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Two distinct types predominate among the winners of the Man Booker Prize, awarded annually to the best novel published in the British Commonwealth or Ireland. The first is elegiac, understated, quintessentially English in its honey-drip pacing and minute revelations, the province of authors such as Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst, and John Banville. The second is the postcolonial romp, a mash-up of wild conceits, low comedy, and sharp social criticism, as exemplified by Salman Rushdie, VS. Naipaul, and DBC Pierre. If the first group is the literary equivalent of Belle and Sebastian, the second is M.I.A., and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, a Booker finalist last year, shares the Sri Lankan artist’s brash, earthy joie de vivre.

Set in Victorian India on the eve of the Opium Wars, the novel slowly pulls together its numerous characters onto the slave ship Ibis, a cast as wide-ranging in color as it is in caste. Center-stage are a young freedman from Baltimore who through a concatenation of circumstances is made second mate, a socially progressive French orphan, a rajah fallen from riches to rags, and a quietly heroic Hindu widow.

Like the great Victorian novels which are its forebears, Sea of Poppies is a well-paced pleasure, a highbrow page-turner. Moreover, it is a work of moral fiction, and although miles and decades separate us from the world of the novel, the book’s central issues are fiercely contemporary: drug addiction, multiculturalism, the gravitational pull of tradition, widow burning, the corrosive effect of the West’s greed and ideology upon Asia.

At the same time, Ghosh never moralizes, never oversimplifies. With the care of someone who assembles ships in bottles, he recreates nineteenth century India: the mansions, alleys, and quays of Calcutta, the fields of poppies growing along the Ganges, the salty patois of urchins and the lapidary dialogue of the aristocrats. Although most of the book is arranged cinematically, with numerous quick cuts between the parallel narratives, Ghosh shows off his craft in a few outstanding set pieces, including a tour through an opium factory and a descent into the grimiest cell of a Calcutta prison. Some of the most gripping language he saves for the final third of the novel, after all the characters have, through various choices and twists of fate, found themselves aboard the Ibis en route to the island of Mauritius. But this is only the beginning: Sea of Poppies is the first book of a projected trilogy, and it concludes with a cliffhanging shakeup merely a quarter of the way into the journey.

In service to verisimilitude, Ghosh refuses to substitute English approximations for Hindi or Bengali terms, and some readers might find his longer sections of dialogue exhausting. Even after multiple reads, some of the novel’s conversations are frustratingly opaque, and the untranslated terms are nearly impossible to track, although, to his credit, Ghosh appends the bookwith an extensive glossary.

If the book’s language is sometimes bafflingly complex, a few of its characters suffer from the opposite problem – being too uncomplicated, too unchanging. This is especially true of the plucky heroes Zachary and Paulette, the freedman and French orphan, whose post-racial, post-sexist attitudes are improbable as they are noble. By the end of the novel, the truest heroine and most believable character is Deeti, whose developing social consciousness Ghosh builds masterfully.

While some of the novel’s characters are tinged with anachronism, it’s a refreshing contrast to the scores of contemporary novels whose moral characters so often are revealed to be hypocrites, and as such, the goodness of Ghosh’s courageous protagonists should be considered more charming than simplistic. Because, sometimes, it’s all right to be charmed.

A Child, After Witnessing the Execution of William Wallace, in London, August 23, 1305:

Me and da and wee Will walking back in the heat and the stink, hollering still in my ears the calls and the cries, and the cries and the cries, even now as how we’s far past the square and the hawkers and buskers long gone and the crowd all doing like me and da and wee Will, back to home and hearth and all, far yes now from the square all of us like blood that’s spilled from a heart that’s stabbed running all over away from where it was to newer and lonelier places. Sanguis Domini nostri Jesu Christi. The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Custodiat animam meam in vitam aeternam. Keep my soul unto life everlasting. Yes. Right on the side of da’s right am I and wee Will to the left, and Will blubbering like he does, and da glancing back to Smithfield saying what it means and how it is to be a man. Tomorrow there the Bartholomew fair, all joy with its bright silks and sweetbreads, the ladies serene and lords becalmed promenading on that boneyard, that field of blood.

Da’s sight none too good with the one rheumy eye and the other evicted from its socket by Frankish steel on Frankish soil in the service of this Edward, this Longshanks, my crown and king, this Edward, this God-anointed god of mine, the eye’s guts long-rotted in Calais, not even in holy, holy Jerusalem, where they say from the blood shed by soldier martyrs sprouts lilies of oh such a fuller white as to blind and dazzle our mortal eyes. Thus and with the sun weak now and old and the shadows sharp and fingery I go myself a bit ahead of wee Will and da who says to Will words Will don’t know, words like justice and treasonry, I go ahead a pace like I’s just tweedling around and all that but it’s really for so da can see the shape of me and can follow not needing to grope around with the rheumy eye for sure footfall. And so we wend around shit puddles and beasty hogs with their teats waggling in the mud and behind now Will with the head and brain that’s still too little to see that names can go all over and not just to the one thing and him saying William’s me, William’s me and feeling all about himself as though God’s own angels might tear him apart.

With home so near I pray against delay and dare not look back as we near the Lion and but then da’s hand on my shoulder the color of a dead carrot on the topside I know without looking and the bottom smooth as water and white like a fishbone from the liming and the bucking and says he hold now son I’ve to collect a debt I’m owed. Haloed by the bilious sun his pock-and-whisker face stretches into a Shrovetide mask, which snorts it too is owed and must deliver a Jew’d interest nip to its liver. Da’s bouffon body making its own way to the alehouse door he charges us now please you be good tanner sons and bring back the piss pots. Sicut erat in principio et nunc, et semper. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. So me and wee Will we hurry down the alleys and lanes to collect before the night eats all of the remaining day and past the women with flopping breasts we drag them backward back to outside the Lion the buckets hot and jaundiced like broth one and then two and then three and then four until wee Will trips still holding one pot’s rim and trips me too and the pot goes dump on us as we lay in the mud and the smell so demonical Will gags out porridge and black bread and with our legs wet like a pleasant wade in the Thames I curse him in the name of Jesus and Satan and Mary and God and box him father-like on the side of the head but his blubbering so pitiful I can no more and thus hold him and he then me. Huffing through my mouth to keep my own first meal stomachbound I smell in the nose of my memory the sweet sad smoke which bears up our meager prayers to the most holy Trinity and the most blessed Virgin and in them my own pleas for forgiveness that I most love the most glorious Mass not for the salvation it brings my soul nor the body and blood of my Savior which I am graced to consume but for the oh so heavenly aroma that does reprieve me for those few blessed hours a week from the stink of my father’s profession that is my curse and birthright and mortal inheritance. Cense my soul O Lord of Hosts.

Seeing the chattel women cackle we pull the piss pot to an alley unsmelling of happy families’ suppers and unlit by taper and I tell him to pull out his manhood and we piss into it together and not much it is, sallow and thin, but it is all our bodies can give so we haul it to the Lion. And we bide. Not once in my ten earthly years have I spilled a piss pot. Wee Will says his legs is cold and I look him with a look that’s all burning arrows and after shrinking he says whose idea was it for there to be a hell. And I say Jesus of course and box him father-like on the side of the head. He starts into feeling himself again and says does the skin really melt off of you, the eternal flames of hell being so hot. And I say of course. And he says does the demons with the three Saracen eyes and the wings of the bat and the tail of a serpent really tear open the bodies of the damned with irons white-hot and spiked. And I say of course. Of course say I. And when da when he comes bumbling out the moonless night so tarry black and the stars like spittle on the lips of God his rheumy eye glosses our wetness and only smells the smells and pats us on the sweaty heads to tell us lads lads we are in the devil’s business, we three drag the piss pots backward back to the tanning shed grafted shoddily to our house.

And the pots set along the shed da kisses us on the brows first wee Will then me and what with high summer squatting down on us even in the shadowblack air the smells of the shed turn my stomach green and so his breath to me is sweet, sweet like bread and beer, beer dark as his teeth dark as shit. And he says lads lads we must be about our best here, your mother inside a saint and a lady and no mistake so we will talk none of what came before. Domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum. Lord I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof. Sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea. But only say the word and my soul shall be healed.

Burst in we three with three huzzahs but ma in the dark in the corner weeping Effie at her breast the babe’s head wet with her tears as her mouth wet with her milk, my goodly and oh so lovely mother’s eyes cast down and away from us at our entrance her fine hand stoking in vain the dead scullery fire. Salve, Regina, mater misericordiae; vita, dulcedo et spes nostra, salve. Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevae. Hail, holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.

Aw Annie da says the hour the hour I know I know and late and the dark and no wood and he plucks the babe crying into the air and says me little girl me little lovely one and ma being goodly and modest even in the home not like the shrill women with faces of grease and paint she returns her arm to the kirtle sleeve even as she cannot bear to grace us with a look and da says what is today but a grand and glorious day for England, a red letter day even if not yet so demarked by Holy Mother Church. He begins jigging about but ma her eyes deep and black like old stones burned by many fires pierces him with a glance and he bobbles Effie into my arms and says that he and wee Will shall go the highways and byways if need be for firewood and liver and meatpies. And Will his heart is a lodestone pulled toward whatever feeling in a place is biggest, and I can almost see the tears and fears slip from his mind as he locks hands with da and dance they round and round as if a maypole had sprung up between them, but my mother and I share a grave heartbroke look with the same sad union as if sharing the last morsel of a blue moon eel pie. Our humour is melancholic, creatures of the black bile are we, autumnal in our spirit. Summer roisterers are da and Will, sanguinous and blithe, and as they merry out the door da hisses me to mind the pots before they return. Ma’s hands veil her lovely goodly face, a face da says cleaved the hearts of more Christian men than the swords of all the Saracen nations put together, a face now more terrible than the woeful reeking shed, so I lie God forgive me to her and say outside there is a trinket I misplaced and before setting Effie into her box of scrapwood and straw I whiff at her head, but the rosebloom burst of babes is masked by the scent we share like a name because it is our name. Tanner. I deposit, I exit, I run, dragging backward the pots into the shed, that house of death, that crypt, that mine of hide and offal whose meager lode provides porridge and black bread and stew, food we shit out and pound back into the skins until they are strong and supple as my mother’s dark hair. The Scotsman too was said to have been a tanner, and to have slain one of the valiantest nobles of that Longshanks our crown and king, flayed the man and tanned his skin as belt and baldrick for his long and bloody claymore.

In the shed the skins lie staked by the limbs to their four posts, staked and stretched in pits rouged by the blood and melting gore. Four pits, four pots, and seizing each foul basin by its edge I pour the piss down into them, but the last and lightest slips from my wet hands into the pit. Praise be to Jesus it does not split the skin and only bounces upon the hide. With my father’s awl I swipe to retrieve it but only push it further away, and so into the pit I leap careful to dodge the skin my breath locked in my lungs. And warm is the rot-frothed goo oozing about my feet, warmer even than the pot still carrying a memory of the sun, and I feel like to faint, the stinks mingling on the heat and rising through me to my head but I shan’t let da find me having failed in my charge infernal as it is. With a heave I hurl out the pot then clamber up the sides, my fingers’ nails cracking open on the rocks and roots laid bare. I slip and climb, and slip and climb, attempting to gain purchase and at last with on my lips a prayer to the most holy Virgin I yank a root secure and hoist myself up to the earth, which after the pit smells of rosemary and roast apples, the ghosts of our mother’s long-cold supper.

Inside again I sense the hush of Effie’s sleep even before I see the child and I untie my rope belt letting loose my gore-wet hosen which fall as I pull tunic and shirt overhead. Would I could have stripped outside and left all there so that ma might not know where I have been and what has been on me and so might I have dared but for the odd rag-and-bone man scuttling along and mistaking my workaday garments for castoff. So I stand naked as Adam in my mother’s home the rising odor behind as putrid as that first man’s first sin, and yea but her eyes turning from the dead fire do see and know all. Salve Regina. Weeping she takes me goosefleshed in her arms and sit we down upon our pallet wee Will’s and mine and she says oh but it wasn’t always this way and needn’t be now and oh would that it might not someday be. Her voice skipping through the longs and the shorts for her folk are northern and her lips and tongue remember the North in moments of joy and trial and most of all the times when those pangs are yoked as she and da roil about the marriage bed wee Will long asleep and me pretending but near enough as I could tickle them if I had a goat willow in hand. I too feel the rough dance of the cold North in my tongue and mouth bottom, and although her words become but nonsense, heathen keening in my ears, I know the sentiment burred as it is in my heart as well as hers. She vests me in da’s clothes stiff with a filth that will not be purged and I know she would wash me too feet and hands and head but there is no water nor wood to heat it. So da’s smock and hosen overlarge and rough and brindled by shit and lye like the hides of Satan’s heifers. Sit we again upon my bed and she says my son my son stroking my fingers as though they were jewels. And she says I did not weep for the hour nor the dearth of wood that left my babe and I in the dark with the stew fat rising and hardening thick and white like ice. I wept for you she says, you and William and the cruel cathedral of men down whose aisle your are already progressing, toward that dark altar of blood and sacrifice. My eyes wet as though her words were onions she tells me she wishes she would have left me as a babe in the care of the black robes so that I might know and understand the God who is such a mystery to her, that I might comprehend the order of the countless strokes of human life as those who read find not merely clarity but beauty in the construction and arrangement of letters upon the page. But what I hear is her regret she did not abandon me and it makes my eyes burn all the more. She tells me what I know already, that priests do not lose themselves to the steel arms of men nor to the hot arms of women, that theirs is the power to bind and loose on earth and in heaven, that by their words they reconcile the human and the divine. I remember the scaffold priest, his face and codex freckled in blood, tears on his papery cheeks, begging the executioner and lord governor to end it and what to me then was his weakness, a lodestone heart pulled in the wrong direction, seems now altogether something else. As she pets my smooth unsundered skin I recall it all dear Lord I remember everything. I cheered, God help me God help me I cheered.

I am freed from my head’s gaol only by the door chirruping open and for no reason I believe that they have come for me whoever they are and for whatever purpose but of course it is only wee Will and da returning, Will holding a small faggot and grinning like a fool, holes where his last wee teeth once were and da with a da-da-da-DA pulling magicianlike a plucked goose from behind his back. Hoc est enim corpus meum. This is my body. They wake dear Effie who shrieks like the damned ma wobbling over to her wimbling da with a look that I know now is not about the youngest of his children. Into the corner I curl cold as November while da’s boot knife rends the bird from gullet to groin. With a wooden spoon Will bangs upon a pan hooting like a mead-maddened owl. To me da says tend to the kindling and when I shut my eyes he says the faggot son the faggot and then shakes his head and says sblood but I’ll do it meself. He does not want to spoil the carnival. Moss-quick the bird’s guts grow from its fissure, slick and grey-red. Toward me Punch-like wee Will bops then yanks at an unseen rope and up roll his eyes and down waggles his tongue his neck lolling inebriate. Were not our father near, I would box him fatherlike on the side of the head. Wee Will is the sea riled in a storm and calm after its passing. He is his father’s son, and in the newborn firelight he monkeys himself to our sister newborn as she sours the air with her scream. Da tugs at the entrails until he pulls them free. The odd stubborn feather meanders the air searching for a home that will never be its home again.

Like a mendicant’s camelhair my father’s garments scratch me and sicken me and into my head I sojourn, to the priest high upon his altar mountain, robed in his own Father’s garments, alb and chasuble, cincture and stole, in daily communion with the King of Kings. Oh to stand at the foot of that golden stair where angels tread always up and down brighter than the sun and more beautiful even than my mother turned now away from us to hide what I know without seeing, that her soul is leaking out through her eyes but Effie now quiet at least at her breast, and I wish for the days when only her suckling was needed to regladden my heart. Pitchy and bitter the wood smoke grows monsterlike and Will at da’s beck drops the rusty grate over the shallow fire pit. Dispensing of the ropy intestines, da cradles the heart and liver and kidneys, his voice doodling an old air: We in our wandering, blithesome and squandering, tara, tantara, teino! Eat to satiety, drink to propriety; tara, tantara, teino! Laugh till our sides we split, rags on our hides we fit; tara, tantara, teino! Jesting eternally, quaffing infernally; tara, tantara, teino! Craft’s in the bone of us, fear ’tis unknown of us; tara, tantara, teino!

It is a young man’s song, a song he sang before his eye was evicted from its socket by Frankish steel on Frankish soil, and my mother she tamps down a whimper as he sings and da mistaking it for a laugh says that’s right Annie, there’s me lass and he capers over toward her, the blood-baptized organs piled in his hands, to show what his hard work and eternal infernal stink have earned, but it is too much, he does not know what he does and so forgive him and me, for her sake alone I snake out my leg as he passes and with his one rheumy eye and the devilish half-light, he sees not but falls headlong before he can reach her. And bless him but he is so proud of the goose his money has bought and the God-designed treasures lodged inside that he sacrifices himself for their sake, turning to the side the hot-wet insides clutched babelike to his chest, turns and bears the full rebuke of the ground upon his shoulder and head. Oh Harry ma says, setting Effie back in her box. Sweet child, she says, kneeling and cradling him pulling him and his spoils into herself and then of all things she laughs. Look, he says, his face dusty and bruised, how beautiful they are, how beautiful, and she laughs again and says yes indeed they are lovely and kisses him on the scruffed scuffed cheek. She takes them from his hand and lays them sizzling upon the grate as da pops to his feet with a tara tantara teino and sets himself to carving the plump goosebreast. Wee Will jolly as a jester sniffs at the sweet meats and makes a show of puffing out his belly as though he had one and not like he and me both with ribs as clear as tally marks. As he rubs at the not belly ma smiles with her mouth but not her eyes pouring out the cups of beer and as she dearly hands me one and I sip at its warm soothing darkness I wish to God my stomach would believe all my mind knows all my eyes have seen but it is renegade, stupid and blind, lusting after the grilling goose parts. Non in pane solo vivet homo sed in omni verbo Dei. Man liveth not by bread alone but by every word of God.

Da turns them over for a light roast, the cooked side staring up at us burnished brown-red the darker lines of grate-bite as straight as the rows of a codex. Heaped the slices of goosemeat wait to be burned and wee Will begs da to let us eat the heart and liver and kidneys first, so hungry is he he says could chew up his own clothes. Da laughing says of course of course and so while the goosemeat cooks we sit around the table da cobbled long ago from the less burnt timber of a burnt-out tavern and with the same solemnity as the blessing he slices the organs and divides each four ways, he at the north and wee Will the south, my mother who is the dawn at the east and me the blackening west, the west, the sun’s grave, and indeed the days are shorter now for although it is summer it will soon be autumn as it must always be. The steaming fists of meat ooze smoking blood themselves the remains of the goose’s own countless suppers and with twin-pronged forks they chew, Will jigging his head about and telling da it might be the tastiest delicacy to ever pass his lips. And da he turns his one rheumy eye to me weak and watery-quavering and says son son eat eat. Please. And the rising sun across the table beams me star-eyed with all the sadness and understanding of the one who stands at the fork in the road knowing both ways lead to doom. And with a false demonical smile I seize my twin-tongued fork and I eat. I eat. Every bite past lips and teeth and tongue down gullet and into my own dark and uncooked parts. Hoc est enim corpus meum. This is my body.

Against the pane, snow as fine as flour eddied and corkscrewed in the wind raging above Bloomington, and on the other side, Adara stood in briefs and a bra, hands behind her head, fingers teasing snarls from her shower-wet hair. The storm was mindless in its bluster, its yearning to be somewhere else – upwind, downwind, left, right – and then chasing the opposite. It would all melt soon enough anyway.

Inside, “All I Want for Christmas” was jangling its way down the hall, but the door to Adara’s single, shut and locked, muffled it to shaking tinsel and cloying melody. Lazing in the steam were all the after-shower aromas of a girl’s dorm: flowered shampoo, Nutella and the plasticine sweetness of rice cakes, body crèmes that smell the way “All I Want for Christmas” sounds, a hint of overripe banana, the scent of a woman’s skin and rising from it snowy puffs of the baby powder Adara had just palmed into her neck. Bracing her forearms against the window, staring down into the deserted quad, she recalled the fairy tales and wondered what a boy would see, looking up at her – the coronation of the queen, the virgin sacrificed on the mountaintop, the princess who would sleep in the cave for a thousand years to cure the plague. People needed to be saved, she thought, even if they didn’t know it.

It was the solstice, and the sky was trying on one gray suit after another, each darker than the last. But Finals were done: Physics, Inorganic Chemistry, Virology, Immunology, Spanish. Five tests, five days, seventeen hours of sleep. She’d done so well throughout the semester that only some neurological meltdown during an exam would have unseated her from the Dean’s List, but every day since the previous Saturday she’d risen to a silent dorm and a viscous unlit sky, risen and sighed and made tea and sat sipping on her futon, reading her Bible and releasing sleepy thoughts into the pages of her prayer journal. Then an apple or a leopard-spotted banana chewed while racing through each Bible-thick stack of flash cards. Then an hour of running or swimming at the gym, lunch at the dining hall, textbook review, dinner at the dining hall, a mutually concerned phone conversation with her mother, unnecessary study groups and practice tests she’d written herself, before the Sandman tracked her down on the futon, a flashcard clutched like a love letter in her hand.

She yawned. The double-paned windows were liquid cold against her forearms and waves of goose bumps were shuddering across her skin, but she knew if she pushed herself up, she’d have to decide what to do next. Her ride back home to South Bend couldn’t leave until Sunday morning, which had meant 36 more hours in Bloomington, sleeping and re-reading Emma and watching a pile of movies in the dorm lounge – a sweet, fleecy, edgeless day and a half. But last night after her study group, a lacrosse boy named Tanner delayed her with chitchat until the others faded to a set of wet squeaks on unseen library stairs, then he mentioned an end-of-semester blowout he was throwing with his “posse” off-campus. She’d said maybe, too tired for certainty, and Tanner left glum. But she really had meant maybe.

Adara Love had attended exactly zero college parties in her five semesters, unless you included the occasional birthday event for girls on her floor, thirty awkward minutes that began with a peppy and off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday” and ended when the last of the six or seven underclassmen departed for homework, MySpace, boyfriends. The parties she knew were her parents’ Christmas Eve get-togethers, families from church playing euchre, eating seven-layer dip, sipping fingers of Cold Duck in Dixie Cups meant for mouthwash.

It wasn’t just that college parties seemed sleazy – she was busy, she told herself: every day of every semester was jigsawed together with homework, MCAT prep, church, tutoring at the homeless center on Saturday mornings, and half-hour blocks in the piano rooms whenever she could find the time. But as addicting as the control was, she knew she could study less. Considering the party, she wondered what she was afraid of: That she’d be mocked? That she would be found out and called a hypocrite? That she’d like it? The slog to the party would be cold, and her bed was beckoning, but hours and days and months of aloneness were droning in the back of the skull, along with the ache for a different sort of contact. Rocking her heels into the plush throw rug, she pushed herself from the window.

She would need an outfit. Probably make-up. Shoes: unquestionably. She was the only girl she knew whose hang-up clothes fit her modular furniture’s 5’ rack: three pastel church blouses; long skirts and trousers two by two in black and khaki; two identical pairs of Levi’s; one three years lighter than the other; one puffy down coat; one bright red track jacket from high school cross-country; one navy sweater vest. At least she’d shaved her legs in the shower – in the winter, her legs concealed by pants, she’d sometimes go days without a razor touching her skin. She slipped on her robe and shower shoes, then walked toward the end of the hall, jotting a mental list of girls whose clothes might fit – volleyball players, the bulimic, a tramp whose father used to play for the Pacers – but none were home.

Tall, tall, tall, with no hips and legs up to here, Adara could think of no one else. But then up blossomed an image of Heidi Altbahn, from Munich via next door, who looked like something from a Nazi propaganda poster, with pounds of buttermilk hair and the permanent lustrous glow of great and goodly Teutonic health. She was almost never in her room, and when she was, it seemed like it was only for sex, crazed screaming sex that sounded like the Spanish Inquisition, which made Adara some combination of 1) sad for Heidi; 2) sad for herself; 3) angry at the boys who were taking advantage of what Adara was sure was the girl’s homesickness; 4) jealous; and 5) annoyed by the fact that it made studying basically impossible.

She rapped on the darkened room’s door, paused for a beat, bit her lip, turned the handle, and pushed it inches across the high-pile carpet. Inside she heard grunting and a strained male voice: “Stop twisting out from under me.” Pale purple light pulsed against the walls. A girl’s voice giggled. A pair of bodies lay face-to-face, arms locked together. Another burst from the strobing black light and Adara’s brain caught up with her eyes: Heidi’s roommate Vu was having a thumb war with a tiny bald boy whose ear was studded with a fake diamond the size of a chiclet.

“Who is she?” asked the boy.

“You’re here,” said Vu, looking up through her cat’s eye glasses.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean …” said Adara

“Can we touch you? Will you burn us?” asked the boy.

“Adara, you’re glowing,” said Vu. Their thumbs were still going at it, like tired dogs feinting at the end of a yard fight.

“I was just – ”

“You’re glowing like an angel.”

“I think it’s the black light,” said Adara.

“Are we going to die?” asked the boy.

“You look so tall.”

“That’s because you’re on the ground,” said Adara.

“Your fingers are like icicles.”

“I was wondering …” asked Adara.

“Maybe she’s the ghost of Christmas past,” said the boy. “Are you giving us a chance to change our selfish lives?”

Adara flipped the switch, painting the air with a yellowy domestic softness.

“Ouch,” said the boy.

“Do you know where Heidi is?”

“Somewhere else,” said Vu, sobering. Horizontal, thought Adara.

“Heidi has huge –”

“Shut up, Willard,” said Vu, letting go of his hand as they shambled up. She was wearing fatigues and her usual red beret over her black bowl cut.

“I need to borrow Heidi’s clothes.”

“Once I walked in on her with a man who had a giant bird carved into my back,” said Willard. “It was like the Discovery Channel. The German girl threw a book at my head. It was Man’s Search for Meaning.”

“I need to borrow Heidi’s clothes.”

“Are you going to impersonate her?” asked Vu. Adara didn’t know the little Vietnamese girl well, but she was infamous on the floor for her scathing snark. Her current spaceyness was a cautionary tale against psychoactive experiments.

“I’m going to a party and I don’t have any clothes and I need to borrow some for the night.”

“Oh,” said Vu, bringing her hands together. “Like Cinderella.”

“I know tons about fashion,” said Willard. “I’m a textiles and design major.” He began appraising her. A wifebeater drooped from his bony shoulders and his wingtips were spray-painted yellow. “What I’m seeing is thirty-three twenty-four thirty-two?” he asked.

“Willard, I have a mission for you,” said Adara, pressing her hands together. “I need bobby pins, spearmint gum, a deck of Uno cards, and a bag of walnuts.”

“Oh. Well. Okay. I am a textiles and design major.” He perked for a moment, grinning vulnerably. His finger wormed through the air and hovered near her skin. “We could dress you in fire. We could make you a fiery snow queen of fire. Maybe Vu –”

Sighing, pulling on a parka, he muddled out. As the door was pulled shut over the luxurious carpet in a way she felt more than heard, as it clicked shut, as the clip of Willard’s wingtips faded on their way down the hall from castanets to the plink of a dripping faucet in another room, Adara exhaled, ran a hand through her wet curls, and loosened the belt of her bathrobe. “I think we have an Uno deck,” said Vu. “I love Uno. It’s the only game I can still play after I take E.”

“So, Heidi’s clothes.”

It wasn’t hard to guess which side of the dorm was Heidi’s and which was Vu’s. On the right, a collection of tiny Chuck Taylors in every color imaginable; a world map in which every nation had been resized in proportion to its GDP; Skittles and candy necklaces and snorkeling masks scattered across a desk along with coffee-stained French novels and copies of The Guardian; on the left, half a dozen gyro wrappers; a life-sized cardboard cutout of Sting, currently wearing against the season a seaman’s cap and fleece vest; a hand-carved pair of giant Nutcrackers; and a rat’s nest of black lace bras, thongs, garters, and other underwear Adara couldn’t even identify. She drifted toward this side, toward the wheeled rack of clothes parked behind Heidi’s lofted bed. An urge seized her to scoop a bra from the pile and check the size.

Adara wouldn’t call her family poor – she and her brothers were always clothed and clean, warm and well-fed – but Heidi’s clothes were a revelation. Turtleneck sweaters as soft as baby hair; gypsy skirts and pencil skirts and asymmetrical lizard skin skirts; a leather trench coat that felt like frosting; jeans as glossy and subtly colored as a blueberry; a mandarin-collared minidress that must have fit Heidi like the casing on a sausage. And the shoes: shimmering Dorothy heels, fur-lined moccasins laced to the knee, meter-high black boots polished so bright they looked metallic.

“I think her dad was a Nazi,” said Vu, picking up the jackboots.

Adara finished loosening her robe’s belt and let it fall to the floor.

“Whoa. Your body is like magazine people body. Are you wearing astronaut underwear?”

Adara pictured Neil Armstrong in his BVDs. “Are you making fun?”

“You could use your underwear for a parachute,” said Vu, reaching for the elastic band of her silver briefs.

“O-kay,” said Adara, shifting her hips away from Vu’s hand in a slow hula. “What kind of underwear do you wear?”

Vu began unbuttoning her fatigues.

“No, no, don’t do that. I’ll take your word for it.”

“I buy tiny underwears,” said Vu. “That’s what Willard likes.”

“Oh, honey …”

“I hope Willard isn’t gay. He doesn’t have any sexy pictures of sexy women on his walls … try on this,” she added, giggling, unhooking the lizard skin skirt’s hangar. After unzipping the skirt, Adara pulled it on and tugged the zipper up. With a rush, it fell back down.

“It fell,” said Vu.

“Yes.”

Other skirts were tried, other skirts found wanting. “It would have been nice,” said Adara, staring into the green-black scales.

“Wait, what about this?” asked Vu, reaching for a hanger impacted between the leather trench coat and a sequined dress. The sweater she yanked out was long and dawn grey.

“That’s nice, but what I need is a skirt.”

“It’s not a sweater, it’s a sweater dress.”

“It’s a dress? They make dresses like that?”

She pulled it over her head. It smelled like skin and powdered sugar and the sort of amber perfume advertised by naked women with indeterminate liquid dripping from their lips. It poured over Adara’s shoulders and back like melted ice cream. On Heidi it would have been clingy, trashy, spending so much of itself on her curves it would have stopped barely lower than an actual sweater. On Adara it hung straight as a sheet on a clothesline.

“Jackboots,” said Vu, holding them up like a pair of bagged pheasants.

“Those heels are crazy.”

“Jackboots!”

“Okay, okay.”

“They smell like conquest,” said Vu, burrowing her head into one of them. “You don’t know anything about make-up,” she added, popping up and banging on Adara’s shoulders with fists the size of ice cream scoops. “You need make-up. You look like a nun.”

She left and returned with pencils, tiny platinum pucks, skinny tubes, lipstick cylinders that looked just like her father’s shotgun shells.

“So,” said Vu. “Do you want the twenty-dollar whore, or the fifty-dollar whore?”

“Maybe I should stick with nun.”

“No,” said Vu. “Nuns are evil.” With a pencil she attacked Adara’s face, which felt as though it were being taxidermied. After fifteen minutes, Vu stepped back, squinted through her specs and smiled. “You look … smoky,” she said, just as the door opened and Willard hopped in, bearing bags. He was silent, staring at her as though she were a 3D puzzle that would eventually resolve into a recognizable image. “You look like the volcano queen.” Snowflakes had collected upon his patina of hair.

Not remembering what she’d wanted, he seemed to have bought everything, including a pale pink daisy he pulled from a cone of tissue paper.

“Thanks,” said Adara.

“You never give me flowers,” said Vu.

That made Adara sad. Boys should give their girls flowers, yes. She felt the tug to arbitrate, but then she caught sight of herself in Heidi’s giant gilt mirror and walked closer. Her face was all eyes and lips, and while the make-up was too heavy – the lipstick was sin red, the rims of her eyes were black as a chimney-sweep’s, and the curve of the kohl made her look like Nefertiti – the person she saw hummed with the sort of power she’d always tried to dampen in herself.

“Take the trench coat,” said Vu, starting at the daisy. “You don’t want to die on the walk.”

“Thanks,” said Adara, nodding, waving, leaving. In the stilettos, she clicked down the hall like a crab on cement, and after two teetering near-falls onto the gritty tile, she decided she’d have to take it slow. Heels were crazy.

The wall clock opposite the elevator read 8:44, but it always ran three minutes fast. Tanner’d said the party started at nine, that the house was at the corner of Swain and Second, a white two-storey with aCape Codporch and a widow’s walk. With downy blond hair that waved lazily as it hung about his face, Tanner was like a cocky puppy, charming even in his misbehavior. He smiled by default, chaired social and philanthropic committees, talked about his daily protein intake, and while he wasn’t tall, years of lacrosse had sharpened his muscles, and his tapered forearms were crisscrossed with veins and arteries. He always looked ready to jump and grab onto something. Although Adara studied harder, she thought he would get into better med schools.

The elevator dinged happily. It would be polite to bring something, and alcohol would be expected. She approached the glass doors, and although it looked like a vampy sashay, the roll of her hips was actually an attempt to keep herself from keeling to port or starboard. Outside a front of flakes barreled toward the dorm like one of those huge synchronized dances during the opening ceremony of the Olympics. She had to lean into it before it cracked open, the cold wind racing indecently up her dress, playing voodoo on her still-damp ringlets, tightening her skin so quickly it made her scalp ache.

But while her ears were already thickening to rubber and her face hurt and the muscles of her back were involuntarily contracted, winter reminded her of her father. As a child, every Friday from Labor Day through Thanksgiving the two of them would watch her brothers’ football games at the fields near their house, and the snowiest games were most memorable. Pete Love explained to her the stunt and the safety blitz, the wishbone, the wildcat. All of this whispered into her ear under the cold bristles of a moustache, a physical memory summoned by the bits of flake no bigger than dander stowing away upon her mascara’d eyelashes. Her brothers – Moses, Enoch, and Gideon – were linemen rooted in the three-point stance so close to the ball they could smell its leather. Her father’s advice was never trust a football player who didn’t start every play with a hand on the ground. He had been a lineman too, and during timeouts he recounted the travails of separated shoulders and heatstroke, bleeding eyes and frostbite. He rhapsodized on the charge and tug and thrust of bodies, the whole northern clash of muscle and will. Adara listened as rapt as if she had never heard words before as he poured peppermint schnapps into their thermos of cocoa. Adara’s mother didn’t attend because the continual pummeling by and of her boys turned her stomach to vinegar, as she liked to say. Being a Pentecostal, she quietly disapproved of alcohol, and as such, Pete rarely imbibed in the house, saving his drinking for the occasional party and his sons’ games.

Adara liked the schnapps ‘n’ cocoa too. She remembered often drifting off against her father’s shoulder during halftime, and by game’s end the action was a flipbook of abstract expressionism. After Adara greeted her brothers with a minty grin, they’d all walk the five blocks home, the brothers fighting over the chocolaty thermos dregs while taking turns carrying a passed-out Adara, who now remembered her drunkest moments as some of her happiest. Adara now understood her more or less unconscious body was the punch line of a group joke on their Puritan mother. However, Adara had since become more like her, realizing that not all jokes end well.

Since the campus sidewalks were heated and ice free, she could cloudgaze as she baby-stepped: the sky was flat and low, a pale pinkish grey, and with a tank of corn snow beneath, it looked like an undercooked and oversalted pork tenderloin. She sniffed at the nightsnow, more mineraly than rain, which only makes things smell more like themselves, mouldering bark, turning dirt to mud, a sweetness laced with rot. But if rain is a memento mori, snow is a crystalline snapshot of a world that might escape time. At night with day scents sleeping the stoniness of snow predominates – it’s a frigid sauna, the H2O solid instead of gaseous, lingering in the way rain can’t. It’s the closest anyone will ever get to being amphibious.

The sidewalks had been empty, but as Adara’s eyes fell earthward, a hillock of colorless garments labored ahead against the battery of wind, obstructing her way. Nearing she could see it was a woman wrapped in shawls and scarves like a Bedouin, nothing but face and complicated arrangements of cloth. As she approached, the oily dreck of sweat, skin, and unwashed hair was intensified by the odor of clothes even longer unwashed. Adara’s mind was a slideshow of gangrene and dry-rot and flesh-eating bacteria. She stopped. The wind was shushing her. The smell of nightsnow was gone.

“I hurt,” said the woman.

Adara set her hand somewhere near the woman’s shoulder. The fabric was stiff and raspy with dirt. “Where do you hurt?”

“Nothing don’t hurt.”

“Don’t you think you should go to a hospital?” Adara toed closer, trying not to breathe through her nose.

“What I need ain’t in medicine. Need a present for my grandbaby.”

“For Christmas?”

“For Christmas,” replied the woman, shifting forward, canting her bulk against Adara, pluffing into her nostrils the smell of rancid Fritos, moldy chili. Adara’s stomach was agitating what little was in her stomach, and her mind was hectoring her to flee, but she did neither.

“What’s his name?”

“Jemmy. He six.”

Some guests would already be wiping their shoes on theCape Codporch’s welcome mat, rapping on the door. Adara imagined a large brass knocker, a hearth, punchbowls of steaming cider.

“Is there somewhere you need to be getting to, ma’am?”

“There’s that mall, a toy store in that mall. Jemmy, he wants a sword. He got a good grandma.”

“Yes, yes he does.” As she said it, a suggestion alit on Adara like a shy bird: kiss the woman on the forehead. The thought was compelled with no obvious reasoning, but with great force. Her face was a broken trellis of wrinkles and cracked skin. Bending, Adara kissed her forehead, feeling flaky grime, beaded with sweat Adara did not wipe from her lips even when she rose again to her full height. The woman gummed her lips, removed a glove, and touched her forehead.

“Could I help with buying Jemmy’s present?”

“Don’t need to do that. Just tired, that’s all.”

Adara stepped back and pulled her wallet from purse. In it were a twenty and a five, and while she didn’t know if five was enough for booze, it wasn’t enough for a sword. She pulled out the twenty. “Here,” she said, tucking it into the woman’s hand.

“What’s your name? Want to be able to say on the note it’s from me and from you both.”

“Adara.”

“Adara. Where’s that name from?”

“It came to my father in a dream.”

“I’m going to go buy my grandbaby a sword. I’m going to tell him it’s from grandma and Adara.”

“Okay,” said Adara, almost sad to see her go. “Oh, wait,” she added, turning, extracting the Gideon she always kept in her purse. “Would you like my Bible?”

The woman’s smile was broad enough to show a few teeth the color of wet chalk. “No need. I’ve been acquainted with the Word for as long as I’ve been.”

As the woman turned and lurched away, Adara ghosted a prayer for her success through the pirouetting gusts. Watching her disappear into the night, Adara shivered, her back rippling with chills, and closed her eyes, rememberingCartagena, trying to relive the heat. The sun releasing warmth like a showerhead. Coffee as black as asphalt, and asphalt as hot as coffee.

Rounding a corner, red neon glowed from a concrete building, tinting the snow pink. The sign came into view: HOOSIER SPIRIT. The parking lot was pocked with potholes, trashed with gravel and hunks of asphalt moated in ice. She stepped off the sidewalk into the slosh, her arms rising like something from Fiddler on the Roof. Her heels wobbling over the mess of snow and stone, she accelerated to avoid pitching to one side or the other. The front door was twenty feet away, fifteen, but then a piece of asphalt crumbled underfoot, and she skittered on the gravel, sliding feet first as though about to steal home. Powerless, imagined what a greasy puddle of slush would do to Heidi’s sweater dress, but her arms swung up involuntarily, and she managed to hook an arm around the side mirror of a parked truck. With no help from her frictionless feet, she grunted, strained, and hauled herself up. Miraculously both mirror and dress seemed to be intact. Entering, she felt her pulse pounding behind her ears.

Warm as a grandmother’s oven, the store’s fragrance was the dustiness of crates and cardboard, the avuncular scent of unlit cigars. Under the hiss overeager heaters, sweating businessmen unsheathed themselves of topcoats and scarves as boys with messy hair hoisted 24-packs onto their shoulders. To Adara’s disappointment, none of the six-packs were less than seven dollars, and she wished she had an ATM card, which had never been necessary because her student ID acted as a debit card on campus. In the corner the radiator hissed like a balloon that was always dying but would never actually die.

Her muscles slackening in the heat like pasta in boiling water, she examined the wine aisle, then the hard alcohol, but they seemed to mock her single, weak bill. She felt doomed to an ungracious empty-handedness, until behind the checkout counter she spotted scores of small plastic bottles, including peppermint schnapps with wrappers colored like barber’s poles. Loitering at the register was a cashier – orange dreadlocks, faunish facial hair, Pearl Jam T-shirt.

“Poison? Oh, right. How much is one of those little bottles of peppermint schnapps?”

He plucked it from the shelf. “Four dollars and forty-nine cents.”

“Awesome. I’ll take one of those.”

“Righteous,” he said, punching keys on the register. “That’ll be five dollars and twenty-seven cents.”

“What?” she said. Without thinking about it, she started tapping her canines together – right, left, left, right. “All I have is five.”

“There’s an alcohol tax,” he said, wincing. Then he started shaking his head, as though fighting a brain freeze. “Wait, wait. Who cares? I don’t know care. You don’t care.”

She shook her head.

“I’m not letting the man get in the way here. What would Santa do? Santa wouldn’t care. You know, you just don’t need to worry about it at all,” he said, taking the five-dollar bill and handing her the schnapps.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll come back and pay –”

“No, you won’t,” he said. “No, I mean, not that. I mean, you don’t need to. You could if you wanted to, but you totally don’t need to at all. It is completely, completely … covered.”

“Okay. Thanks. Really,” she said smiling, turning to exit.

As she was pushing the door open, he said, “Are you doing anything tonight?”

There were few ways to respond delicately to this, and like most people, Adara always seemed to find the perfect riposte hours too late. But there, then, she knew all at once exactly what to do: she pressed her fingers to her lips and blew the nice skinny dreadlocked boy a kiss, then strode into the thrashing wind before he could do anything about it. “Let us be lovers,” she whispered to no one. “We’ll marry our fortunes together.”

Stamping toward theCape Cod, excited because she did not know what would happen next, her blood was ricocheting from her aorta to the tips of her fingers and back. Because the rest of the time, she did know what would happen: three more semesters of lonesome overwork, a month of MCAT hell next spring, four years of med school, yet lonesomer overwork without even the institutionalized human contact of dorm life. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to go where she’d always wanted to go, wasn’t sure if she wanted to be the person she’d always been told she should be, wasn’t sure she had a choice in either anymore.

With her mother on the phone she tried to be perky, reporting high test scores and Sunday sermons, but even then Linda sometimes asked her if she wouldn’t maybe like to come home for a long weekend or two, bake strudel and take a load off and cozy up with a evening’s worth of Fred and Ginger flicks. But Adara always resisted, fearing the retreat would be permanent, fearing as much as a lame marriage the thought of being one of those sad thirtysomething women at church who worked at the library and still lived with their parents.

As a devout college girl far from home, the social options were either the sort of worldly party she’d thus far avoided but was about to attend, and the various Christian alternatives: InterVarsity, Campus Crusade, and others, each filled with the sort of people Adara desperately hoped she was not. She’d tried the Christian groups at the start of her freshman year, when she had yet to build up a tolerance to loneliness, and they’d been found wanting. Adara hoped she was not the one who had been found wanting. She attended their Thursday night meetings, sang the lyrics to the sappy songs they projected onto a wall, listened as boys in plaid button-downs fumbled through brief talks elucidating – or more accurately, not elucidating – various New Testament passages. She brought rhubarb pie to the get-togethers they called socials, played Guesstures and Mafia, watched PG movies sitting five to a sofa in dorm basements. She even dragged herself every Tuesday morning to the women’s Bible study/ accountability group, but the conversations quickly devolved from Pauline exegesis to Platonic chitchat about the plaid-shirted boys. There are fates worse than death, and it quickly became clear to Adara that spending ninety minutes with Christian girls was one of them. As for the boys, Adara was all for earnestness, but their humor was yuk-yuk Howdy Doody nonirony, blithely preadolescent in a way that was as creepy as grown women who played with dolls. Since the boys were incapable of flirtation, they channeled their libido through lingering side-hugs and a suspect amount of incidental body contact. They had been found wanting, which was to say, she wanted more – a fun beyond board games, friends who didn’t think negative emotions were sinful, boys who knew what happened in the movies after the lingering kiss faded to black.

But now she was fording the slop of a street called Swain, trying not to teeter as she ascended the porch stairs of a whiteCape Cod, strangely quiet for a college party. She knocked. Waited. Knocked again.

What flung open the door to the entryway was a turtlish boy with pale hair Brilliantined into a severe side part, Buddy Holly glasses and a Christmas cardigan, each side of which portrayed a red-nosed reindeer in profile smooching its mirror image. The two antlered kissers merged at the nose, a quarter-sized red button.

“Hi,” said Adara.

“Rather tarted up for a Jehovah’s Witness, aren’t we?” he asked in a flouncing British accent. She felt bad for him. He’d probably never been invited to many parties either and decided to go all out, only to be tacitly exiled to the position of doorman by cooler party-goers in their slit skirts and complexly faded jeans. She would make a point to chat later, after she found Tanner.

“Um, no, Tanner invited me.”

“Tanner is the least interesting person I know. I’ve met Dalmatians with more intellectual curiosity.” His hand, mittened in something – a cloth moose antler – was rolling at her ensemble. “That is clever,” he said, pointing at her. “Almost too clever,” slipping the jacket off her shoulders without asking. “It’s like anti-irony. It’s like an irony of irony. And does that mean it’s not ironic, or that it’s more ironic? I have no idea. But it’s superb.”

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Neville,” he said. “But if you wish, you may call me The Admiral. Or Stephens. Or Professor X. I rather like that.”

Baffled, trying to reground herself: “How do you know Tanner?”

“His room is next to mine. All he does is sit-ups and poor acoustic covers of Journey. I have, indeed, stopped believing.”

His words were resistors dampening the electric thrumming of her muscles and nerves; she was clenching what she knew from Anatomy were her orbiculares oculi, against rising tears. She didn’t want the person she’d come to see to be the sort of person who did sit-ups and played bad Journey covers.

“Oh, hell,” Neville said, wincing. “Sometimes I’m just a prick.” He patted her shoulder. The cold had fogged his glasses to the point where she could no longer tell what color his eyes were.

“See here,” he continued. “You have no idea what you’re about to enter here, but let me say this: you look as good as you hoped you would.” He ushered her inside, and she went from tromping to clicking, which she liked, and in the warmth of the front hall, her back muscles relaxed like a Twizzler coming undone. In the living room she could not yet see, Bing Crosby was dreaming of a white Christmas.

“Thanks. I tried.” But she had no idea what he was talking about as he kipped away with Heidi’s coat … until she stepped from the hall into the living room, where fifty people were sitting and standing and foxtrotting poorly, and all of them, all of them, dear Lord Jesus Christ, all of them were wearing Christmas sweaters. Each one a wonderment of godawful grandmotherly kitsch. Those who saw her didn’t know how to react. After some moments, their looks settled into pity. Tanner spotted her, but not soon enough. He scuffed toward her in wingtips, in a sweater stamped with a snowman smoking a corncob pipe.

“Hey, Adara. You look … when I said Christmas sweater, that’s not quite what –”

“You didn’t say Christmas sweater.”

He squeezed his eyes to wrinkles, clenched his hands into balls and began pounding his temples. “Idiot. Stupid. Fuck – sorry. I know you’re not big into swearing. But sorry also, about, the not telling you thing. The forgetting thing, I mean.”

She wanted to stomp his feet shoes with her jackboots, but she said: “No, don’t worry about –”

“That dress is hot. And those boots? It’s like an S&M thing going on.” The British boy traipsed back into the room, smirked, and mouthed: Journey cover.

“What the hell are you talking about?” She found her finger stabbing his pipe-smoking snowman. “Do you think stupid dirty jokes are helping you out here? Are you trying to make me feel worse? Are you trying to make me leave?”

“Hey, hey. Okay. Why don’t we get some eggnog?”

She followed, resisting the urge to slap the back of hisLabradorhead. At home, her mother was decorating the tree, listening to Bing Crosby, and if Adara had been there, she would’ve been humming along.

“So,” she said, breathing, “you live here?” It was a nice house: oak floors that shone like oil, high ceilings wearing a selvage of rococo crown moulding, Mission furniture, wood-framed Remington prints, all dusted in diffuse yellow light from the torchés and table lamps.

“Yeah, me and some of the lacrosse posse. Plus Zane, who’s a rock star, andNev, who sings for the band. Nev’s funny-looking little guy who got your coat.”

In the kitchen four girls were hunched over an island and its bowl of red and green peanut M&Ms, all of them in ugly sweaters and Mary Janes they’d undoubtedly toss out tomorrow, not even setting them in the Salvation Army donation bins outside every dorm.

“But Ringo would be so sweet,” said a girl with a brutal red pageboy cut. “He’d make you breakfast in bed.”

“Lay-dies,” said Tanner, walking past them to the pitchers of eggnog on the counter. He poured a pair of glasses. “Homemade,” he said.

“It’s full of roofies,” said one of the girls. “He’s going to rape you.”

“Shut up, whore,” said Tanner. He turned back to Adara. “No roofies. Just right.”

It tasted like custard pie, coating her mouth and tongue and throat on the way down.

“I’d do George,” said one of the girls.

All she’d had since lunch was a banana. She finished her glass and poured another. It was like an electric blanket for her stomach.

“There are lots of calories in that,” said Tanner. “You might want to tone it down …”

He turned to her and sighed. “Be right back. Just show yourself around. I’ll catch up.”

“Okay.”

The music droning from the hall could’ve been the soundtrack to the dreams of suicidal robots; as she jiggled open door at the end of the hallway, an overripe earthiness rolled out of darkness cut only by the golden parallelogram of her entrance, spotlighting a boy as he was about to inhale a messy cigarette.

“Pain,” said the boy. “Oh Gaad.” A few chuckles from gray-brown forms Adara was just beginning to distinguish. “Close it.”

“Sorry,” she said, stepping inside and shutting the door behind her, stabbing someone’s foot with her heel in the process. “Sorry.”

“Here,” said a girl’s voice, accompanied by a series of pats on taut leather. Adara followed the noises, her hands swimming in front of her, until one was finally grasped and she turned and sat.

“Gotcha,” whispered the same girl’s voice.

“Thanks. What’s going on?”

“Kid A with Grade-A,” said the girl.

The music was somehow both repetitive and random, childlike and menacing. The girl who guided her to the couch took the cigarette. Small and Gypsy-featured, her nails were chewed to the quick, and sprouting from her eyes were false lashes as long as a comb’s teeth and gilt so heavily they glowed gold above the lit cigarette. She took a long puff. “Goddamn I love it,” she said, exhaling, handing it to Adara.

“What?”

“I’m springing for you. Take it.”

“No, I’m all right.”

The Gypsy girl clucked and inhaled again. Her eyelashes quivered. But instead of releasing the smoke, she slipped her other hand behind Adara’s neck and pulled her head down, pressed their mouths together, opened her lips inside Adara’s, and blew. Smoke tingled on her tongue and gums, sugary and harsh at the same time, but the girl’s lips were soft as gummy bears, and as Adara swallowed and hacked, as the girl let her go and dimpled and passed the cigarette, she felt vertigo, heart-thumps, helium ballooning inside her head, aching forearms and hands too weak to squeeze.

Then a boy hooted. The contours of the room and its bodies snapped clear. And for the first time since leaving her dorm, she was warm. She didn’t know if she enjoyed what the girl had done – if she had, it was a woozier pleasure than any she’d ever felt. She felt the other girl’s lipstick on her lips. It wasn’t a kiss, she reassured herself. It took two people wanting it to make a kiss.

Adara warily stretched her legs, settling Heidi’s boots onto a coffee table. Her heels were grateful. “Was it as good for you as it was for me?” asked the girl, dimpling again. The room’s smoke was so thick it had turned the air to liquid. Letting her head fall to the left, Adara looked at the Gypsy girl and decided she was pretty: if a lesbian was going to make a pass at her, it was better if she was a pretty lesbian.

Then, as though emerging from underwater, she heard the lyrics for the first time.

The big fish eat the little ones

Not my problem, give me some

You can try the best you can

You can try the best you can,

The best you can is good enough.

She didn’t know how to take that. The music she loved – Patsy Cline, the Temptations, the Beatles before they got crazy and went to India, Hank One, Elvis, U2 before they got weird and self-referential and now once again – wore its heart on its sleeve. She’d never understood why you’d listen to music that made you bluer than already were. Music should make you feel better. The best you could was good enough.

“Adara Love? ADARA LOVE!” Starting so violently Adara almost kicked someone in the head. That corner was still the matte black of a construction paper witch’s hat, but the boy’s voice was familiar. In her mind a banner unfurled over the entrance to her church in South Bend: Adara Love seen inhaling marijuana, kissing girl at profligate college party. He stood and galumphed toward her, the room chuffing and groaning. “Adara.”

She rustled herself up, head buoyed on the ceiling, feet iron on the floor. “Hey, there, you,” she said as the sack-bodied boy caught his foot on the leg of a side table.

“Oh Gaad,” he said, falling. The floor-sitters rolled away just as he impacted. He grunted, smiling up at her, his grin hopscotching along Adara’s neural pathways until it found its avatar in her mental storehouse. She couldn’t remember his real name, just that everyone had called him “The Glug” behind his back. He scrambled up. The room was growing restless, and seemed about ready to spit them out.

“Let’s talk in the hall,” she said.

While exiting, he said: “I don’t know if you remember –”

“Oh, of course.”

“Stanley Michael Glugzinsky,” he said, extending a hand that felt like a raw hamburger as she shook it.

“Good to see you again, Stan. How were, uh, Finals for you?”

He was heavy the last time she had seen him, and now he was heavier still, with a head as square as a mason’s dream and a heavy man’s curly, unkempt brown hair. “Yeah,” he said, “taking a little time off, working a little. Probably start up again next fall. Change of direction, pick up another minor, maybe.”

“Oh, okay. Good.” Instead of an ugly Christmas sweater, he was wearing a T-shirt silk-screened with a burro piñata and beneath it, the caption “I’d Hit That.” His smile was so broad it looked painful. “So, uh, who’s here you know, besides me? If I’d had your digits, I totally would have called you. Are you on the MySpace?”

“No. Tanner invited me. We’re in pre-med physics.”

“Oh.” His smile sagged for a moment, before tugging itself back up. “Let me show you around. It’s a righteous place.”

“Who do you know here?”

“Neville.” The noises of his fat-tongued shoes on the hardwood sounded gastrointestinal. “We’re D and D buddies. We roll together most Sundays.”

“Oh. Okay.” They were back in the kitchen. One of the girls was at the stove, stirring a pot of cocoa.

“John was an amphetamine hound.”

“They all were.”

“I’ve heard he’d go on jackhammering for hours,” said the girl with the blunt pageboy.

“Jackhammering for hours?” asked Tanner, stepping into the kitchen from the living room, breezing past the girls at the island. “Who’s calling for me?” His permanently tan cheeks glowed pink. Adara smelled beer on his wet lips. “Stanley,” he said, nodding. “How do you know the lovely Miss Love?”

“I know Adara from the way back,” said Stan. “When we were little we did the Christmas pageant together. She was Mary. I think I was a rock.”

“– but Paul’s so smug. He’s that guy who laughs at you when he first sees you naked.”

Tanner took Adara’s hand, and she did not let go. The chocolate simmering on the stove made saliva pool under her tongue.

“Bye Stan,” said Adara as Tanner led her to the living room, where half a dozen kids were taking pictures of themselves with their cellphones while holding Scrabble tiles or patting their lips inquisitively. Behind the sofa, a few couples were trying to foxtrot as “Fly Me to the Moon” ended and “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” began. “Look,” said Tanner, squeezing her hand, scanning the dancers, “I don’t really know, I mean, how to, but –”

“I’d love to.”

Smiling his puppy smile, his right hand spread across her lower back, his left took hers, and he began shifting his weight from side to side in the ponderous two-step of every wedding slow dance. “Wait,” she said. “Let me show you. It’s a square, and to start your left foot goes forward and my right foot goes back.” She manhandled him into the box step. Slooooow … sloooooow … quick quick, sloooooow … ”

He smelled like woodsy cologne, and Bengay, which was reassuring. During high school, Adara’s brothers always smelled like Bengay. His hand on her lower back was warm through the thin fabric of Heidi’s sweater. He stared at his feet, but he remembered. His steps and rhythm were right. His head ratcheted up to reveal the smile of the naturally athletic as their bodies learn new things. The muscles of his shoulders were large and round, like tropical fruit.

“What’s your family do for Christmas?” he asked.

“We listen to Bing Crosby, and play Scrabble, but not as a joke.”

“Do you like it?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I like it.”

The doorbell rang. “Neville!” shouted Tanner past her ear. “NE-VILLE.” It rang again. “Sorry,” he said. “I should get this. Right back,” he added, sliding his hand down off her back, a little too far down. He somersaulted over the sofa, landed in front of the coffee table, leapt over it and the Scrabble players, and nailed his dismount a few feet from the front door. A couple of the girl Scrabble players clapped while a couple of boys took pictures of them clapping on their camera phones. Tanner opened the door, letting the wind slither into the room, and raised both fists over his head.

“Vodka luge!”

Everyone shouted, and even the girls arguing about the Beatles peeked in. Adara guessed he wouldn’t be right back, and followed the rest of the crowd outside, where Tanner and three other compact blonde boys carried a 5’ ice sculpture of a snowman up the stairs, grunting, arms swelling from the strain, and set atop at cube of cinderblocks. Hugging herself, Adara gritted her teeth to keep from chattering.

“We could’ve used this guy when we were battling that ice warlock last Saturday,” Stan said to Neville, giving the snowman a shoulder rub. Tanner ducked back into the house as the other three fist-bumped each other.

“God it’s cold,” the girl with the awful orange pageboy said to Adara. “Aren’t you freezing?” she asked, pointing at the miles of leg covered only in hose. “You must really want to fuck Tanner,” she added, before trotting away.

A sweet-as-Splenda rendition of “Little Drummer Boy” was wafting outside, but the girl’s words had spilled vinegar all over it. She did not want to have sex with Tanner, and she was about to follow the girl to tell her so, but then liquid-smooth silk was slipping over her shoulders, and leathering was filling her nostrils.

“It’s an amazing coat,” said Tanner, easing his hand behind her neck and lifting her hair over the collar.

She wheeled and felt the tails waft behind her.

“Thanks,” she said, as Neville took up a bottle of vodka, and brandishing it, declaimed in a stage-voice: “As brevity is the soul of wit, I will refrain from referencing Mythraic cults, Valhalla, Henry Eight, Edgar Allen Poe, or Judy Garland. Instead, I will say only this: Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.” Tanner’s hand had roosted on Adara’s shoulder. “Who goes first?” Neville asked.

Involuntarily, Adara found herself saying, “I’m game,” before she could consider what exactly she was volunteering for. Tanner’s attention, the Gypsy girl’s maybe-advances, and the evil pageboy girl’s meanness had left her frazzled. Something needed to be broken. Stan’s face slackened like a rubber mask that had lost its plasticity from overuse.

“Great,” said Tanner. “I’ll do the pour.”

The snowman wore a birthday hat, a scarf, a smug grin. Its spherical nose was identical to its buttons, the last of which was bored through with dime-sized hole, the end of a tunnel that snaked up the snowman’s body until its source in the apex of his hat. The strongest thing Adara ever drank was the communion wine they served once a month at church, to commemorate Jesus’ death.

“Ten bucks she gags giving Jack Frost a blowjob,” said the girl with the ugly pageboy cut.

“All right,” said Tanner. “I’ll pour slow. Just raise your hand when you want me to stop.” She knelt in front of what she told herself was just a very large, very elaborate straw. The cement porch burned cold into her knees. She licked hers lips before they touched the lowest button. “Just raise your hand when you want to stop,” she heard Tanner say. With seconds, a rill was slinking onto her tongue, viscous, syrupy. And cold, so cold, colder than any water could ever be. It scalded her throat and she coughed but didn’t raise her hand, even as it painted her esophagus in fire and burst blazing into her stomach. After what felt like forty-five seconds but was probably only five, the hoots and cheers began; after ten she could no longer feel her tongue; after fifteen she felt vapors rising into her head as though Bengay had been rubbed along the inside of her skull. Boots clopped up the steps and for a moment she thought it might be the police, and since she felt like she about to be sucked into the sky, she raised a hand, but the rivulet remained steady. She heard a woman’s voice say Adara, is that you? with the vowel-bending of a German accent. Almost gagging, she raised both hands, and after a last sluicing, the button ran dry. She pushed herself to her feet and her world sloshed from side to side.

At the top of the steps was a sort of dark yeti, with mane and beard and many-zippered jacket all black as oil, and at his side was Heidi, gloriously healthy and imperial in a poncho as red as a holly berry, her blonde hair alive in the wind, so bright it burned.

Her head thrumming like a centrifuge, Adara waited for Heidi to tear her ensemble apart, knowing no fairy godmother would save her from the magisterial German girl. The secret hung between them like a storm cloud, dark and sparking, but Heidi’s eyes were benign when she said: “You look smashing” and squeezed her shoulder, pecking her on the cheek. Distantly, it seemed, the lacrosse boys were hooting and calling her name.

“This is Zane,” said Heidi, gesturing toward him with a sort of brisk formality, as though he were her business partner and not her lover. His height alone would have made him a basketball star in high school, but he looked like the type who instead read French novels and set fire to sheds and deflowered girls. His black hair was chaos, his beard looked like it had been assembled by absentminded birds, and his eyes were the color of the bags beneath them, the color of a grape popsicle. Adara didn’t know eyes came in that color. Clopping over, he sniffed at her hair, snorting through long nostrils. “You smell delicious,” he said. “Baby powder.”

“And your make-up, it is quite elegant,” said Heidi.

“It was Vu.”

“Ah.” The porch snow was so dry the partygoers’ steps sounded like grinding glass.

Just then Adara noticed Tanner was standing by, cradling the vodka. “I know. Compared to usual, it’s like amazing.” Heidi pursed her lips at this faux pas, but Tanner kept bending the note until it sounded the way he wanted: “Most girls, they wear too much make-up, so it’s cool you don’t usually, you know, wear it, because now it makes you seem that much more beautiful. You’re like a flower that only blooms once a year.” He grinned.

“You’re a silver-tongued whore,” Zane said to him, neither a critique nor a compliment. Adara’s dimples caved. She had liked the compliment. “Where’s the High Life?” Zane asked, searching past them into the house.

Neville strode toward Adara and smiled with the officiousness of an IOC president. “Bravo,” he said, shaking her hand with his, covering both with his moose-antler mittens. “Bravo indeed. The wise men celebrated the Savior with gold, frankincense and myrrh. We do the same with Svedka.”

“Nev,” said Zane, pirouetting in the doorway, “what are your thoughts on the Magi? Were they pilgrims? Necromancers? Madmen?”

“Royalist spies, free jazz saxophonists, fevered disco dancers.”

Swiveling her head from one to the other did not help Adara parse this interchange. “Do you think you maybe could maybe help me get some food?” she whispered to Heidi. “I could eat a goat, and I’m a little woozy.”

“Is the hummus you made in the refrigerator?” Heidi asked Zane. He nodded, then added, “What I’m wondering is this: three foreign dignitaries bring your adopted a trio of fabulously valuable gifts, and yet you keep up the carpentry biz? In Podunk Nazareth? Connect the dots for me here, Nev.”

“Maybe they had to leave everything behind when they fled to Egypt,” said Adara.

Zane whipped a finger to the end of his nose while the index finger of his other hand pointed at her. “Bango,” he said. “Case closed.”

The kitchen’s fridge was clean for a boy house – “That is Neville’s doing” clucked Heidi – but offered only a unopened can of water chestnuts, the bowl of hummus, and three Chinese throwing stars.

“We had to hide them from Stan,” said Zane. “He has this whole ninja complex thing.”

“He owns throwing stars?” asked Adara, whose head felt like an iron bar in a room full of magnets.

“No, Blake does,” said Zane, pulling out the bowl.

“For Blake, they are decorative,” said Heidi, massaging an eyebrow as thin and pale as a two-day-old moon.

“Correct,” said Zane. “Somehow Stan found them at the last party and killed a neighbor’s cat.”

“All I remember of Stan from way back is him drinking a gallon of milk at a youth group party on a dare. Whole milk.”

“I know we have some pita here somewhere,” said Zane, rifling through a cabinet until he found the bag.

“Did he … vomit?” asked Heidi.

“No. But after he finished drinking it, he spread-eagled on the floor and didn’t get up for three hours.”

“On a dare?” asked Zane, offering her the bag. “No money?”

“Nope.”

“I think there’s something to be gleaned from Stan’s character there.”

“It might be stale,” Heidi warned, stripping off the plastic wrap, tearing open the bag of pita, scooping up the hummus.

“They way she eats, this one,” said Zane, in a very good Jewish mother voice.

The hummus began sponging the booze, and as soon as Zane left to fetch beer, Adara swiveled toward Heidi, tugged at the sweater dress and said “I’m shho shhorry.”

She swallowed the plug of pita, then repeated, “I’m so sorry for borrowing your clothes without asking. I just –”

“Back pain, always the back pain. I can’t go running. No camisoles. No tanktops.”

“I’d say you’re doing all right in the clothing department.”

“My hips are too wide. My thighs, they touch.”

“Most people’s thighs touch. Hips, hips would be nice.”

Zane was thomping toward them, shouldering a case of High Life with a crewcut of snow. Setting it on the island, he said, “Wait, is this the part of the show where the two cute girls complain about their bodies? Because if it is I’d rather listen to the lacrosse team get blasted and talk about their pubic grooming.”

Censure usually cowed Adara, but the vodka had coated her brain in fuck-all, so instead of apologizing, she said, “You’re a boy. Your body isn’t like our bodies.”

“And for that, I am very grateful. He stared down at himself, fingers probing his beard. “I wouldn’t want to have sex with me.”

Adara chuckled, Heidi rolled her eyes, and Zane shrugged, tipped back his High Life. “My sister has food issues. Pretty girls shouldn’t complain about their bodies.”

“I do not complain,” said Heidi. “I am talking about genetics, wishing mine were not so much my mother’s.”

“Your mother’s foxy,” said Zane, winking.

In the living room Stan was saying how he knew Adara from way the hell back.

“Her mom’s a Habsburg,” said Zane, filling a glass of water from the tap. “The Holy Roman Empire people.”

Zane set the glass in front of Adara. “Thank you,” she said, then took a long drink. “I could use this.”

“I know,” he said. Adara blushed. She wasn’t used to being taken care of.

“Very distant cousin,” said Heidi, filliping snow off the great cube of beer.

“I knew about all this stuff way before we met,” said Zane, his eyes flicking between the two girls, incandescent. “Renaissance history, freshman year. The War of Spanish Succession, the Habsburg jaw, all that jazz. I could do a whole History Channel special on the Hanseatic League.”

“Habsburg jaw?” asked Adara.

Zane’s second beer opened with a cush, and he said, “Ever want to scare yourself sometime, check out Charles Dos of Spain. Guy looks like the unholy byproduct of a witch and a carnie. Huge schnoz, chin like a plow. You know whenever court portraitists can’t produce a flattering likeness of you, you must be horrifying. Underbite so bad he couldn’t chew.”

“Cousin many times removed,” said Heidi. “Not the best the family’s genes produced.”

“Fortunately the bloodline was diluted by the time it got to you,” he said. “You have a very nice jaw.” She did have a nice jaw – defined but rounded. Adara’d always thought her own chin was a bit too sharp, plow-like.

Heidi smiled. “Hanseatic League,” she murmured, while Zane began removing his battered jacket as carefully as if it were made of paper, not heavy leather. He was a strange boy, cocksure but self-revealing. He was stately, despite his disheveledness, but behind his banter hid some sadness, Adara thought. The arms he was pulling from the jacket were tapestried with tattoos, but they were not the usual barbwire, big cats, and buxom women: there were skinny birds, typewriters, pinked clouds, reindeer. Meeting the sleeves at the wrist were hands long as Rachmaninoff’s and pale as primer against the Super-8 vividness of his tattoos’ blues and greens.

Catching herself staring, Adara was about to speak, when he said, “So, who are you?” Some voice in her told her to say Christian, but they’d just met, so instead, she said, “Just another lonely pre-med major laboring in the salt mines.” She pulled a cold beer from the box and cracked it open. “Smells like South Bend,” she said. “Ethanol.”

Zane smiled, sniffing at the rim of his second empty. “I mean, as a cheap beer connoisseur, I’d say the Bend smells more like Old Milwaukee, but I won’t quibble.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“What is it called?” asked Heidi. “Leprechaun Hills?”

“Shamrock Hills.”

Heidi smiled, easing in beside him on the other side of the island. “The tree moss is carved to make it look like monkeys hanging from the branches.”

“Hanging monkey moss?”

In his face, Zane was battling that particularly American shame: embarrassment at riches. “My dad was big into topiary a couple years ago.”

“Five bathrooms,” said Heidi.

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?” Adara asked.

“One,” said Heidi.

“So there are six bathrooms for four people?”

“Three,” smiled Heidi.

“Mom isn’t around anymore,” said Zane.

“Oh, sorry,” said Adara. She pecked at her pita crust.

“Your family has a coat of arms,” said Zane. “Your dad runs Goldman Sachs’s Munich office. You guys have a villa in Abiza and a condo in Bali.”

“They’re beautiful, and we use them.”

“Your dad’s girlfriend certainly does.”

Adara thought if someone said this to her, and it had been true, she would have cried, but Heidi only pursed her lips. “And her supposedly gay assistant who kept looking at my décolletage. She’s Rumanian,” she added. “She’s twenty-six. When we visited Papa a year ago, she would prance from one room to the other room in her underclothing, offering Zane shoulder massages.”

“She’d heard of the band,” said Zane, neither bragging nor apologizing. “She said she’d been to our Aachen show. She had our album on her iPod. She showed me.”

“While she was in her bra.”

Adara knew it’d be blasé to say, You’re in a band?, so, after another hearty draught, she asked: “What are your band’s influences?”

He nodded, winced, bobbed his head from side to side, stared at the ceiling, then finally he shook his head, sighed and said, “We make American music.”

“And it’s amazing,” said Heidi, taking his hand, leaning in closer to Adara. “Really. I hate everything. And I love it.”

Adara smiled. She liked American music.

“Zane is majoring in music theory. He plays twelve-tone cello pieces for fun.” Just then Heidi’s purse sprung to life with the leitmotif from “Ride of the Valkyries” and she pulled a slick cellphone from the slick leather, so black it looked wet.

“Hallo, Mutter,” she said. “Nein, nein, das ist eine feine Zeit. Was ist die Frage? Haben Sie schon weinen?” Her large incisors dug into her lower lip, her eyes cranking themselves to slits, her voice box constricted. “Nein, nein, es ist in Ordnung. Bitte nicht sagen, bitte.” She stood up, raised a trembling hand to the other two, and clipped out of the kitchen and down the hall. Adara took a long sip of beer, pretending to study an IU Lacrosse calendar magneted to the fridge.

“What time is it in London?” Zane asked, his eyes trailing Heidi. “Anke drunk-dials a lot. Tells Heidi she’s lonely. Then Heidi comes to bed crying. It’s not fair for her, but I guess it wasn’t fair her dad abandoned Anke either.”

“And your family’s … ?”

“My mom took off a couple years ago. Pretty clean break. It’s easier for me than for Heidi.” Adara couldn’t imagine going for two days without speaking with her mother.

“It’s harder for my sister,” he continued. “She’s sixteen. A whole lot of sixteen.” He sighed, then rattled his head from side to side as though trying to dislodge the long-crusted thoughts. He pointed a long, guitar-callused finger at Adara. “Why am I piling this on you?” His teeth were large and slightly crooked and very white. “You came here to have fun. Fun!” he shouted, raising his fists. “There is no reason for us not to be happy.”

But, of course, this wasn’t true.

“All right,” he said, popping off the stool, slipping on his jacket, pawing through kitchen drawers until he found a thermos, then pouring some of the stove’s hot chocolate into it. “I need nicotine, and you need to check out the view from the widow’s walk.”

Up one set of stairs and then another, until Adara found herself with a boy she didn’t know in a small cube skinned in glass, skirted by a narrow porch and a wrought-iron railing. The wind was smearing snow against the panes. They stared silently into the storm, and she could feel alcohol shimmering down her veins.

“I need heat,” he said, and she was disappointed, until he removed a pack of cigarettes from his jacket, opened the glass door and stepped out. Wondering what Heidi would think of them alone together, Adara followed into the manic wind and after she pulled the thermos from under his arm, he removed a revolver-shaped lighter from his jacket.

Smiling, he rapped her stomach, which she tightened for no reason she would admit. “No stove door. I suppose it wouldn’t fit so well under Heidi’s jacket. ” She blanched and he grinned. After explaining he had an embarrassingly thorough knowledge of his girlfriend’s wardrobe, he poked the Marlboro into his mouth, then tried flipping the lighter to life, but the mistral swept in from all sides, quenching the flame after every ignition.

“Wait,” she said, and cupped her hands around his mouth. He gave a one-finger salute and tried again; flame engulfed the tip, mangling it to crinkled orange-black ash.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I’m not good at most things, but I got a little common sense.”

“You’re more self-deprecating than most pretty girls. I don’t if I like that or not.”

“I don’t know if I care that you like it or not.”

A ghost of smoke emerged from his broad mouth before the wind tore it apart. Leaning over the rail, something hard pressed against her ribs. “Oh,” she said, pulling out her bottle of schnapps. “Better than a stove door.”

“Do you often carry schnapps around?” he asked, setting a hand on her shoulder. “This first step is admitting you have a problem.

“A gift for the hosts,” she said, pouring the schnapps into a cup of cocoa, stirring it with her pinkie, then licking the mixture off. It tasted like a distilled peppermint patty. Her eyelids snapped into her sockets like two rolls of flypaper.

He sipped and coughed and squeaked, “A little strong, sister.”

She took the cup from him and drank the rest and hung it upside-down on one of the railing’s spears and crossed her arms around her ribs, rubbing her fingers along the leather less for warmth than the pleasure of its kittenish softness. “And I think it’s good things for girls to be self-deprefating – desperating – deprecating.” Her tongue had bloated, numbed, a drugged slug.

He inhaled and splashed cocoa into the cup. “All I know is that most people make fun of themselves to beat other people to the punch.” She stared at him, imagining Heidi. Their kids would be gorgeous, with skin the color of sugar and eyes like jewels.

Her coils hovered in an updraft as she watched the branches joust from their unsteady trunks. Her usual urge to paddle a conversation forward had subsided. She wanted to say something true.

From the porch someone shouted, “Drink that snowman’s guts,” and an errant snowball flew from an unseen hand past its intended target, plopping wetly against a car. The sky was glowing like a computer monitor in a dark room and the wind was shushing the downstairs drinkers parentally. Curtains of snow fell below them then burst up again, scattering against the trees.

“It’s so fucking beautiful,” she said.

He stared past her, crossing their lines of sight, and on the fuzzy edge of her peripheral vision, she thought she saw him smile. “Whatsoever is true, whatsoever is good, whatsoever is fucking beautiful,” he said.

She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue like a child at the doctor’s. In the boots, her toes felt vised by ice. Without her help this time, he lit his second cigarette.

“You won’t be able to coach your kids’ pee-wee soccer if you keep smoking those.”

He coughed out a nebula of smoke. “Kids? Let’s not jump the gun.”

“You’ve got to start somewhere,” she said, pulling it from his mouth and tossing it over the railing.

He said “Hey that was my last …” but before he could finish the wind caught the cigarette and held it nearly still for a moment, as though deciding what to do with it, then tossed it high over the railing. Zane plucked it from the air and returned it to his mouth. “Looks like God’s on my side,” he said.

“God doesn’t like you smoking either.”

“God has bigger fish to fry.”

“God isn’t a joke.”

“No, he isn’t, Adara Love. Ahem,” he added, raising a finger. “‘A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell.’ That’s C.S. Lewis.”

“You’re a Christian?” she asked, picking up the thermos cup he’d set on the walk.

“You sound surprised.”

“I am surprised,” she said, hiding her mouth behind the cup.

“Because I’m drinking beer at a party? Because I’m not wearing a plaid button-down?”

She wanted to say: Because you have sex, and you’re not married, but she thought it sounded prudish.

He continued: “I’m not saying I’m happy about it. If you believe in God, it seems to me you’ve got to think at least one of three things: he’s cruel; he’s incompetent; or he just spaces out for centuries.”

Adara dismissed this unoriginal critique by motor-boating her lips. This was not her first theodical rodeo. “You sound an awful lot like an atheist to me. That’s what they always say, blaming God because the world isn’t perfect.”

“Darlin,” he said, wrapping her thin upper arm in his fingers, “I’d love not to believe in God. I’d love to let the universe ride on a past of pure cosmic chance and a future of benign secular humanism, but I can’t. I feel him everywhere. He’s the sun I see through the bars of the cell. I know God is real, and it hurts.”

She turned to face him, startled: she was ninety percent sure God was real, but he certainly wasn’t her shadow. She bristled at the irony, at God’s careless division of gifts: what she wanted was belief, what he wanted was doubt.

She had never liked talking about her faith, at least not when it was hard. “God loves you,” she said, hoping it was true for Zane, for her, for the world.

“I agree,” he said, dropping his hand from her arm, taking a drag.

“So then what’s the problem?”

“Look at me,” he said. “Every need I’ve ever had has been met, and most of my wants. I have a mostly functioning body, a mostly functioning car, a mostly functioning band. And Heidi – have you seen her? Have you talked to her? Unless there’s a lot about dormlife I don’t know, you haven’t slept with her.”

“I wouldn’t kick her out of bed.”

He laughed. “I get to have Heidi. Do I think God loves me. Hell yeah I do.” Into Adara’s mind flashed an picture of Heidi and Zane in a slick groaning cat’s cradle of appendages: Adara now had a face, a body, for the generic man she’d heard through the walls having sex with Heidi – the man she had tried not to imagine, the man who made Heidi moan in German, the man whose words and grunts made her own cheeks burn as she tried to study the properties of cadmium oxides, so much noise that on more than one occasion, Adara had fled her room with sweat on the back of her neck, letting herself simmer down in the dorm lounge to the laugh track of sitcom reruns.

“To whom much has been given, much will be expected,” she said. But she knew this was insufficient. She was reading a line from a script, a script that happened to be the Bible.

“That’s why I’m fucked,” he said. “Case in point,” he added, waving his cigarette hand in the air. “Rio, first of my two senior years. Study abroad. Booze, rainforests, and what might delicately be called an open-minded sexual culture. Classes are a joke and Portuguese is getting good and I’m jamming every night with this psychdelic Afro-Cuban collective. Then it’s May and we got one week left, and one of my flatmates who’s always volunteering at these orphanages asks me – again – if I want to go. I say sure but right before we get inside he says the kids have leprosy. And I freak out but he tells me it’s a myth leprosy’s contagious, and so I meet all these tiny kids missing parts of their faces, plus some of them had legs or arms amputated, hobbling around on crutches or pulling themselves across the floor. I thought I was going to lose my lunch, so my buddy Steve and I went into the kitchen and started cutting up fruit for the kids’ snacks. But so all the kids followed us in there, and there’s no AC and they were all talking at once and crowding us, and I just lost it all and hurled in the sink.”

“Oh no.”

“And then I felt like the worst human being in the world. And it was even more awful because all the kids were falling over each other to get me a towel to wipe my mouth or to get me a glass of water. I remember this little girl who had no legs crawling across the dirty kitchen tile and pulling herself up on a chair and grabbing a towel from a cabinet and then waving it in the air so I’d pick her towel to wipe the vomit off my mouth with.”

“Did you pick hers?”

“Yeah. But I must have wiped my mouth five times with five different towels.”

In the wind, she could feel her ears turning as hard and as red as holly berries, her cheeks burning from within.

“So we cut up the apples and bananas and give it to the kids and then we read little kid stories to them in Portuguese, then after a while we take off, and we hug all the kids, and they tell us how much they love us, and then we leave. Then that night I went out and blew a hundred bucks at a churrascaria on steak and lamb and cachaça.”

Taken together, the five most expensive meals Adara’d ever eaten hadn’t cost that much.

“I spent all this past summer doing mission work, volunteering in Cartagena. I think about it a lot.”

“Did it make you miserable?”

“When I could, I spent my nights in the orphanage with the drugs babies. Most of them couldn’t sleep for more than half an hour before they’d wake up screaming. It was awful. So I’d sit with the nurses in these rocking chairs in the nursery until another baby woke up and then I’d set myself back down in the chair and cradle it and tell it Bible stories in Spanish or just sometimes say Jesus’ name over and over, praying for them.” It had been in those moments, in the half-dark, murmuring to herself, that she had been almost certain that God was real, that it was his love she felt for those little Juans and Veronicas.

“Did that make them better?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” said Zane, “if Peter and John could say ‘In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise and walk,’ and some crippled guy starts leaping around, don’t you think we should be able to pray for crack babies and re-hardwire their neurocircuitry?”

“What?” It was surprising enough that he was a Christian, but she’d never met anybody who actually believed in faith healing, not really.

“You don’t think Peter and John really healed somebody?”

“No, I think they did. I just don’t think you can,” she added, sounding harsher than she intended.

While still staring down at the street, he gave her a light shove in response, but she wasn’t expecting it and in the heels she slipped and fell hard onto her hip, cocoa slopping onto the railing.

“Shit,” he said, squatting in his boots and taking her wrists in his hands. “Sorry about that.” Without strain he pulled to her feet, then dusted the snow off Heidi’s coat. His hands were cold. He smelled like roses.

“It’s fine,” she said, pressing her hand against her side. “I was just being snarky. Maybe you can heal people. I’d like to think that.”

“Those babies in Cartagena were lucky, having you to hold them.”

“Not any luckier than those kids with leprosy. Lots of those drug babies die young, and lots of the ones that survive have mental disabilities.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he whispered so delicately for a moment Adara wasn’t sure he’d said it at all, wasn’t sure even if he had that it would was anything more than a generic complement. Since starting college, she had swaddled her heart with enough romantic padding that boys who weren’t Christian bounced away, but he wasn’t bouncing.

She wanted to touch him – nothing sexual, she told herself, just take his arm, lean into his black leather for balance, for support, to stand for a moment with a boy who wasn’t stupid and wasn’t awkward and wasn’t a jerk, to stand and watch the storm before he returned to find Heidi and she returned to find Tanner, who wasn’t stupid and wasn’t awkward and she hoped wasn’t a jerk. But then a bitter heat started snarling inside of her, and almost involuntarily she said, “I don’t feel very good.” This was why people said not to drink on an empty stomach.

“Oh,” he said. “Let me help. I should have known better.”

She was warm descending the steep stairs, her arm slung around his back. He was mentioning water, Wheaties, pillows. As they reached the landing below the second flight of stairs, the railing began shaking from the bass line of music she couldn’t hear yet, until they reached the kitchen, where Zane guided her onto one of the empty barstools. In the adjacent living room, whose speakers were now bellowing a techno remix, the couches had been cleared, lights dimmed, and dozens of people were dancing to a man telling them that they were all made of stars. Despite her nausea, Adara trundled herself over to the doorway while Zane looked for cereal. At the far end of the room a machine was wheezing fog into the air, which was starting to smell like burnt fruit. In the corner, a young man who appeared to be a Tibetan monk was drinking a Coke, talking to Stan. Zane’s boots thumped and rattled behind her.

“Breakfast of champions,” he said.

“Vodka?” she asked, turning toward him and the orange box in his hands.

He smiled and she began crunching the brown squares. “Not too fast,” he said.

“Who’s the monk?”

“Neville’s the president of the international student union. The monk texted to ask him what was going on tonight, so Neville invited him over.” The monk smiled over at her as the girl with the hideous Crush-colored hair shambled into with another girl, who was saying, “Why don’t we do it in the road? That’s a damn good question.”

The girl with the orange hair said, “I’ve always thought Paul was kinky,” before noticing Adara. She smirked. “Well, well, what’s happened to you?”
Some part of Adara wanted to recede with a shrug and a mournful mouthful of Wheaties, but instead she stood, rising a head and more above the girl, then bent herself until her face was in the girl’s ear, so close she could see three piercings in her upper cartilage, smell herbal conditioner. Revenge pooled with saliva under her tongue as she whispered: “None of the Beatles would’ve slept with you … because you’re not pretty.”

The girl’s ear pinked as Adara’s face hovered back, and in the space of a card being flipped, the girl pressed her thumb into the bump at the bridge of her nose, swept the underside of her tongue over her lower teeth, and pressed her lips together. “You’re a bad person,” she told Adara.

It was Adara’s turn to flush as the redhead wandered back into the living room. Zane’s eyebrows were approaching his hairline. “I’ve seen Siobhan not tear up with a waiter’s corkscrew stuck halfway into her thigh. What the hell did you just say?”

Adara had never before said anything so perfectly terrible, so terribly perfect. But before she could reply, Heidi appeared in the doorway red-eyed, her shoulders rising inches at a breath, her hands white blocks clutching her cellphone. Zane pulled her up into himself, and her head fit perfectly in the hollow formed by his chin and neck and chest. Heidi sobbed, they swayed, and Adara tried not to think about how long it had been since she’d been held, really held, held like that. She stepped back, leaning into the fridge.

In the living room, a man was caterwauling that a seven-nation army couldn’t hold him back, and the kids were jouncing in time with the slutty blues, shaking their hips, mouthing the words. For the first time Adara considered the possibility that the dancing kids and the others like them throughout the world pressed their bodies together not because they wanted their dancing to simulate sex without the messiness of STDs and abortions and the next morning’s bitter psychic aftertaste, but rather because sometimes you just needed someone to touch you.

Zane said, “Your mother would be just as unhappy no matter what, even if you were there with her. There’d still be the histrionics.”

Heidi wrestled out of his arms. “What? She was on the roof of her flat. Her toes were over the edge.”

“I just don’t want her to use you.”

“Histrionics? Suddenly this problem with emotion? Am I histrionical? Are you going to leave me for some fifty-kilo model?” Adara slunk back.

“It’s a power play,” he said, manacling her wrists in his hands. “She just wants to make you sad.”

Halfway to the hall, Adara was ready to check out when she found herself pulling her own 55-kilo body as erect as it would go and then saying without any forethought: “Zane, you need to lay off.” He spun on a bootheel and Heidi peered around him quizzically. Jolted by adrenaline, Adara stepped forward and steadied her hip against the island: “Stop trying to solve everything. We don’t need your diagnosis right now.”

One of his hands was worming its way through his hair, while the other was far above his head, opening and closing a high cabinet door, opening it and closing it, opening it and closing it. Adara tried again: “All I’m saying is that the relationship mothers have with their daughters is special.” At home, her own mother was almost certainly in bed, her nightly dose of Scripture consumed, a damp washcloth over her eyes.

Heidi added, “I don’t tell you that your father is unstable, so do not be telling me –”

“Okay, I’m done,” he said, slamming the high cabinet shut. “I have a low tolerance for flagellation.” Heidi shrunk to let him pass.

“Sorry,” Adara said to Heidi, testing to see if she could stand on her own. “I made that worse.”

“He always wins our fights. He always wins everything.” She reached for a green M&M lying atop the island, but her hand collapsed and she flicked it into the sink. Adara was making a bow of her back, trying to relieve the pressure on her insides. Insides. She laughed. A few months out from the MCAT, the shape and composition of the jejunum, ileum, and duodenum were tattooed into her memory, and yet she still thought of them all as her insides.

“What is it?” asked Heidi. “Laughing would be nice, now.”

“Sometimes I still feel like a kid trying to be a grown-up.”

“I know I’m a grown-up, and I don’t like it.” The orchid white skin of her wrists had purpled from Zane’s squeezing.

They slid into the living room, where the music told them love would tear them apart. Near the hall, Stan was talking with the young Buddhist monk, who Adara now noticed was wearing canvas high tops that matched the henna of his robe. “It was midnight, and he was still wearing the wraparounds?” said Stan.

“He called me a blessing. He pressed his hands together and bowed. He mentioned The Troubles.”

Despite the queasiness, Adara couldn’t resist. “Bono?”

“What is up?” Stan said.

“Apparently you didn’t get the ugly Christmas sweater memo, either,” Adara said to the monk, yanking at the burlappy orange sleeve of his robe, before Heidi pulled her hand back.

“No, no,” said the monk. “Please, tug away.”

“This is Adara and Heidi,” said Stan. “Adara and I go way back.”

“I’m Kunjo,” the monk said, raising his voice above the music. “But back to Bono. This was Boston, October. Tibetan benefit dinner. And I had an advanced investment strategies test the next afternoon.”

“You’re English is really good,” Adara said, trying to be heard without shouting.

“I grew up outside Chicago.”

“How did you find Bono?” she asked.

“Bono found me. We got into Boston at midnight. All I want to do is watch MTV until I fall asleep, and I’m drifting off to a Shakira video when I get a call from the front desk. The concierge is telling me Bono saw us in the lobby and wondered if he could come up to my room. So I say sure, then two minutes later, there he is, bowing and nodding and saying I’m a blessing. Stubble, shades, cross necklace. Then without warning, he just hugs me and tells me he feels the pain of my bondage. He hugged me for like forty-five seconds. Then he started talking about Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. He compared communism to apartheid. He pronounced ‘apartheid’ like he was sneezing. All this while he’s still hugging me. Then he tells me about this time in 1990 when he was sitting on the rubble of the Berlin Wall and this small East German girl toddled up and handed him a daisy. He said they found a bicycle and rode through the city together on it, the girl sitting on the handlebars and Bono pumping along. Then he mentioned Desmond Tutu again. I told him I thought Zooropa was an underrated album, and he just looked at me like I was an alien, so I told him I went to IU, that I was a finance major. Then all he shifted into capitalist mode and told me his financial planner was advising him to shift a substantial portion of his investments into BRIC funds, and then he asks if I know what BRIC stands for, and I say yes, Brazil Russia India China, and he says China is really booming and that we should get in on the ground floor, and I just stared at him for a minute because I couldn’t tell if he was kidding. But there was zero irony. But still – China. He was recommending that I, a Tibetan monk, invest heavily in the Chinese stock market. Then after I didn’t say anything, he noticed the Shakira video and mentioned how excited he was about the growing popularity of Latin music in America, and then he told me how he met Shakira at Christopher Walken’s house. And I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

“So what did you do?” asked Adara. If he hadn’t been a monk, she would’ve thought he was pulling their leg.

“I asked him if I could lead him in a night prayer. Buddhists don’t have night prayers, but I thought, this could be fun, so I take hold of Bono’s hands while Shakira’s humping a table on the TV, and I start praying, and I invoke just everybody – Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, Buddha, Confucius, then just to test him I mention Zoroaster and L. Ron Hubbard, and he didn’t even flinch. He just kept nodding and squeezing my hands. Then I prayed for world peace and Third World debt relief and AIDS relief in Africa, and an end to the American embargo of Cuba and an end to the genocide in Darfur and the Congo, and for the victims of the tsunami in Asia, and then to cap it, I asked whoever the hell it was we were praying to bless the sales of U2’s new album, which I mentioned in the prayer included a song entitled ‘Yahweh,’ which I said seemed both very true and deeply felt but also prescient and of the moment. And by that point he was crying, and then hugged me again for a while, and that was just a barrel of fun, and he told me he too had grown up in a divided country and blubbered a little about Belfast before he finally left. As I was going to sleep, I thought to myself Why couldn’t it have been a U2 video and Shakira who wanted to touch me?”

“Meditate on that one awhile,” said Adara, who wondered if her mother would’ve thought Kunjo was going to hell. She wished she wasn’t wondering the same thing.

He laughed. “So you ladies are of the Jesus persuasion?” Adara raised her hand and bobbed her head, while Heidi said, “I would like to think that if God exists, he and I have made a sort of non-aggression treaty.”

“Don’t you miss believing in a God who’s a person?” Adara asked the monk. She gestured at the Christmas tree in the corner of the room. “You know, the stable, the manger, the wise men, the shepherds. A God who’s not just an idea.”

He didn’t appear to be expecting that, but soon his face’s surprise melted into a sort of warm forbearance. Adara hadn’t meant to offend, but she felt some tug to correct people who she knew were obviously wrong. If someone else had the truth, she thought, wouldn’t I want to know?

“The Buddha was a person,” said Heidi. Kunjo rolled his palms toward Adara. “I know they’ve told you we don’t believe in anything, that we think the world is evil and we’re trying to escape. But I don’t believe in nothing. I believe in everything. Jesus is great, and if that’s how you immerse yourself more in the world, if that gives you peace and makes you a better human being, wonderful.” He raised a finger. “But it’s that wanting you’ve got to watch out for. People chase after so much silliness, and that only brings pain.” The finger tapped her on the shoulder. “But to quote the honorary Buddhist Bob Dylan, ‘She’s got everything she needs.’ What you’re looking for isn’t outside, it’s inside.”

“Whoa,” said Stan, “that could be on a bumper stick.”

As much as the monk’s words made sense, Adara wanted to tell him that different ways of thinking weren’t equally valid, even if the consequences were good, wanted as politely as possible to explain that some things were true and some weren’t, but her insides were starting to burble angrily. “I’d love to keep talking,” she said, “but I’ve got to go lay down.”

“Lovely meeting you,” said Kunjo, waving as Heidi led Adara down the hall. “I hope you all thrive.”

“Zane’s room,” said Heidi as they neared a door at the end of the hall. All she could hear of the music now was the bass, which was squeezing a blood vessel in her brain in time with the beat. Behind the door she heard a woman’s voice saying, “Maybe the underwear drawer. Isn’t that where you always keep things?”

And then a man’s voice: “I’ll check under the bed.”

Heidi’s breath quickened. Ahead of Adara she stormed the room just as the woman’s voice said, “This snow better be worth – ”

The first thing Adara saw was Tanner, foreshortened, facing away from the door, head rooting under the bed, butt tight against his boxers, which were covered in exploding hearts, with a cartoonish little Ka-Boom! caption inside each, and along the band, repeating itself like a stock ticker, the word HEARTBREAKER. Heidi swatted at the light, and the warm incandescence revealed the Gypsy girl sitting topless on the bed. Her nipples were pierced with gold bars. Adara looked between the girl and Tanner. It looked as though someone had taken an ice cream scoop and carved a trench down the center of Tanner’s back. Adara swallowed hard and thought heartbreaker was about right. The Gypsy girl gasped as Tanner removed his head from under the bed just in time for Heidi to grab him by the hair and yank him to his feet. He howled, hands flailing behind his head, and without a word, Heidi pushed him aside and turned her eyes to the Gypsy girl. Adara hadn’t noticed the leather belt nesting on top of the crotch of her underwear, the tip passed through the heavy buckle. The girl began to push herself up, but before she could Heidi grabbed the belt and hurled it across the room, then started slapping the girl, who tried to cover her breasts and head at the same time. The whole scene was so shocking it took a moment for everything to register.

“Come on, Heidi”: Tanner’s words snapped her aware, and she put a hand on Heidi’s shoulder, tugging her back. The fierce German woman turned, crying. “It’s okay,” Adara said, guiding her backward as Tanner stared at the floor. A few blotches of lip-gloss were smeared on the larger circles of his chest, the smaller circles of his abs. She wondered if the girl had given him a blowjob. Fast, too fast, the girl’s ribcage rose and fell, the bones pressed out against her dark skin. She was thinner than Adara, but not prettier, Adara didn’t think. Tanner looked only at Heidi when he said, by way of explanation, “We were just trying to, uh, find cards. Poker, we were going –”

“Get out,” Heidi said, not meeting his eyes. The Gypsy girl rose, almost hyperventilating, her eye starting to swell. Grabbing his jeans and her bra from the bed, Tanner glanced at the Gypsy girl then said, “Jesus, Heidi.” Whimpering, the girl circled past, not trying to cover herself any longer.

“Whore,” said Heidi as she passed. Tanner handed the girl her bra. They shuffled out of the room, not touching, staring at the flooring as though there were secret messages of comfort carved into it.

Heidi sat cross-legged on the bed, pulling off her boots. The facts of what she’d just witnessed were rolling around Adara’s head, looking for theories into which they might drop. Two things were for sure. Tanner had very nice muscles, and he was never going to invite her to a party again.

“Those are nice,” said Adara, settling next to Heidi on the duvet and stroking the carbuncled rows of what looked like uncut black gems. She was trying not to be afraid of Heidi, who was staring into the corner at Zane’s desk. “What are they made of?”

“Alligator.”

“They’re beautiful,” she said, rubbing the knobs.

“Thank you.”

“What were –”

“Please, no.”

“Sorry,” said Adara, turning her attention to the room, which was large and high-ceilinged, its walls the red of desert sunsets. The floor was bare but for Heidi’s boots and a pair of ugly Christmas sweaters, one medium-sized and one quite small. A bay window bulged into the storm and beside it a pair of electric guitars watched the room like old men unimpressed by their presence. Bookshelves packed with thick titles lined the opposite wall, adjacent to a futon and a desk cleared but for a happy white laptop and a carved wooden bust of an unsmiling African man. No posters broke up the bloody vastness, only a small framed painting of the Nativity. Adara wondered if hitting someone were much worse than telling a person she wasn’t pretty.

“It was drugs, wasn’t it?”

“Possession of heroin is a Class C felony in the state of Indiana, punishable with up to three years in prison even for a first offense. I looked it up. Crane, Zane’s bassist, he used to deal and got caught when he was nineteen. Nine months, and only because his father spent top money for the best narcotics lawyer in Chicago. Now he can’t get a decent job.”

“I think I thought Tanner kind of liked me.”

“Would you have had sex with him?”

“I don’t think so. But maybe I would’ve let him kiss me.”

“Take off your boots.”

“Oh,” said Adara, starting, “is Zane particular about his comforter?”

“No,” chuckled Heidi, letting her head fall to the side so that it was only inches from Adara’s. Even with streaked makeup and tiny purple hammocks under her eyes, Heidi was beautiful in a way that would not soon fade. “There’s just no reason to torture your feet anymore. The boy you were trying to impress is probably fucking that ratty little tramp with the pierced nipples. How gauche.”

Adara still wanted to pick at the moment of violence, but Ride of the Valkyries ended that. Heidi sighed and found her phone and pressed a button and moaned “Hallo mutter,” then rocked herself to her feet and walked to the door. Before she left she pointed at the futon and mouthed Rest.

With a sigh Adara rolled off the bed and fell onto the futon. As she rolled onto her side, she wondered whether she would’ve come to the party if she’d known what was going to happen. She pulled a blanket from under the futon and pillowed it beneath her. It smelled like Zane.

Her sleep was cracked sometime later by the creak of the door opening. Bending low, so that Adara could smell the lilies of her perfume, Heidi kissed her on the forehead and said, “Gute Nacht, liebes Kind. Mögen Sie schlafen mit den Engeln.” Loose waves of blonde brushed over her face. It was a blessing, but as she fell backwards into unconsciousness, as Heidi pulled the red shawl over her head and draped it over Adara’s body, she remembered a long-forgotten sermon in which the pastor had said “blessing” was derived from an Old English word meaning “to wound.”

The next thing she knew, a cowboy was clopping through her dream. Her eyes half-opened to darkness and a dark man hunched over the desk, palming the top of the wooden bust. He twisted the top of the head off then settled into the desk chair and removed his black jacket and shirt. But something was missing, and he scanned the room impatiently. The snowlight glowed on his pale slim back with its plate-sized tattoo of a pelican stabbing its breast with its beak. Beautiful. Across the room the duvet was rising and falling with Heidi’s breathing. Zane found the belt in the corner, lassoed his arm with the loop and pulled it tight. He picked a syringe from the desk and removed the cap with his teeth. From years of candystriping Adara knew what came next – the needle probing then plunging, the thumb’s slow and steady depression – but the reaction was nothing she could have prepared for. His aspiration sounded like a wounded bird, like a pearl-diver gasping upon emerging into the world of airy light. Reanimated, he pulled out the syringe, dropped it chittering to the floor. Under the covers Heidi groaned and shoved off the comforter.

“Zane, what?” Raking her hair back from her eyes, she surveyed him. “Oh, no.”

Humming, he swayed in place, his arms billowing in the air like the tentacles of a squid.

“Go sleep on the futon.” Adara pulled Heidi’s poncho up over her eyes as Zane veered over and sat her feet.

Adara felt him lurch up and clomp away. “Hey cutie.” The headboard slammed against the wall with what Adara guessed was his belly flop. “Fancy seeing you here.”

Adara heard Heidi groan, heard kissing that sounded like rude eating. Adara couldn’t help herself, peeking out from under Heidi’s poncho. Dark underclothes were flying to the floor. “She can hear us.”

His head was moving down her body. “She’s asleep.”

“Ouch.” Her hands were in his hair. “Ouch, stop biting.” Heidi began making noises that were not unhappy noises, noises that increased in frequency and pitch and volume. Adara’s blood was pounding, and not just in fear – her skin was tingling, her face feverish. She craned her neck to watch Zane flip Heidi over with one arm, her bottom large and dimpled and very white. Heidi huffed, “Sie Bastard, sie Bastard, ich liebe dich.” Despite herself, Adara tried to see his penis, but with his back turned, she wasn’t able. Yet while she couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it, she could hear it, or at least heard Heidi feel it, the German girl keening, a wail as much pain as pleasure. They were yoked on their knees like a pair of Ss stuck together. Zane was growling, powerful, one hand pulling Heidi’s hair back by the pale roots. Heidi wouldn’t have been able to stop him even if she’d wanted to.

Adara’s hand slid down her stomach, down Heidi’s dress, wondering what it felt like, wondering what would happen if she stood up and stumbled toward the bed, where Heidi was whimpering, her voice cracking, fist clamped to the bedpost for support. Adara closed her eyes for a moment, and on her eyelids burned an image of herself bound and blindfolded. She opened her eyes with a shake of the head, chastising herself for the thought. Shame was firing down onto her, and she wanted to flee, but her eyes were so sandy, her feet so cramped, the futon so soft. She considered all she’d said and done that night, and more incriminating, all she’d thought and felt. It was hard not to think that she’d failed some test.

As sleep streamed into her head, an image appeared, blocking the bed. It was the woman she’d met on the sidewalk, the woman she’d kissed. She was rooted before her, but transformed. She was glorious, her rags replaced with a fuller white tunic, her back unhunched, straightened to perfection, her face still wrinkly but glowing, grimy no more but instead so clean Adara could see a lipstick imprint – her lipstick imprint – on the woman’s forehead. In her hand the woman held a sword, no child’s gray plastic plaything, no, a glittering broadsword long as a broom handle, its silver handle June-bright. And then the woman bowed her head, still smiling, and drove the sword into the ground. Flame flowered upon the blade and guard and handle, flickering and warm, and the final thought Adara had before the end of that first night was how much very much it looked like a cross.

It was me alone at Cuffy’s, swilling corn beer and waiting for the mouse. I was underwhelmed and oversexed, woeful and old, and not half as drunk as I wanted to be. Football was over, spring training was a month off, Castro had shut down the Tropicana, and cops and hobos were finding friends of mine crushed and shredded and burned in places never mentioned in Variety: the bilgy beaches of South Bay, the El Segundo onramp to the 405. The TV above the bar was as dead as the moon, and three stools down, a cube in a bowler and topcoat too heavy for March was eying me like he was a razor and I was a strop. In the corner lounged the Looney Tunes crew, carrying on like they do, tittering like hussies and sipping their bitty cones of gimlet and sloe gin fizz. It was just the rabbit sitting, two-legging a stool against the wall, his big rabbit feet propped up on the rim of the pool table, the pig and the duck and the bald hunter laughing at everything that came out his mouth. About my head a zeppelin of a fly was circuiting lackadaisically, and I swatted at it with my splinted paw, which had swelled up big into a soft club.

“Thomas,” the rabbit called to me. “Thomas, come nostaligize with an old man.” The others goggled my way, and the pig gave me a white-gloved thumbs-up. As I waved Bugs away, the Ivy Leaguer in the bowler asked if I’d ever heard of William Jennings Bryan, and I debated the merits of frying pan and fire. But finally the rabbit said, “But Thomas, it’s my birthday.” I glanced up at the nudie calendar tacked above the bourbon shelf, where about half the days were X’d off. “The eyes,” he said. “The eyes of March.”

With my splint and my beer, I shuffled across the clapboard’s peanut shells in the dishwater blonde light, setting myself down on the edge of the pool table by the rabbit’s feet. He didn’t take them down. The pig blew a kazoo and offered me a party hat. He was the only one wearing one. I told him thanks but no thanks.

“You were there my first Hollywood birthday,” Bugs said, jiggling his wrist and its Mickey Mouse watch at me. “Remember this? Mickey’s still ticking. You were the best roomie ever.”

At the name of the Disney posterchild, Daff heaved an empty Tom Collins glass at the wall opposite, almost braining a raccoon playing darts, Pork took the kazoo out of his mouth to cup his hand around his snout and boo, and Elmer muttered, in the King’s own English, “I loathe that man.” Obliged, I slammed my bandaged paw on the table, and through the pain grunted, “May his mother rot in hell.”

“Hey T-t-t-t-tom,” said Pork, “Is it true you were the one who p-p-p-p-p-painted the devil horns on, on, on …” He was treading water, not wanting to say the name. “On that jerk?” he said, raising a stubby finger at Bugs’s watch, whose faded Mickey still sported faint red crescents behind his ears.

“Just trying to be accurate,” I said.

“Hey Tom,” said Daffy, eying me but raising his hands toward the hissing raccoon by way of apology, “What he get you for your first LA birthday?”

“Arrested.” All I remembered of that night, the summer of ’37, was a motorcycle with a sidecar, a gun-toting priest, a truckload of rotting bananas, and four very angry Chinamen throwing me off Santa Monica pier. But the Looney Tunes crew tossed their heads back and cackled like hatchlings waiting for the worm.

“Bugs Bunny,” said Elmer in his tea-and-crumpets accent, “a man with a criminal past, but not a criminal future.”

Bugs shook his fist. “To the moon, Elmeh,” he said. I wasn’t sure if it was an impression or not: if you closed your eyes, Bugs Bunny sounded just like Ralph Kramden. When I asked if he’d got any presents, he said, “The good sirs at Warner sent roses and carrots this morning. And Daff here got me a tie bar, which I’ll be wearing on the red carpet after those Oscar nomerations come out. And I bought myself a Studebaker.”

“Hey, T-t-t-t-t-t-tom,” jackhammered Porky, that sweet sausage of a lackey, “what happened to the p-p-p-p-p-p-p … what happened to the hand?”

“Grand piano. Three stories up.”

They all puckered at me like my words were made of lemon juice – the Looney Tunes bunch risk life and limb on set less than Lucille Ball, and the worst thing probably ever happened to any of them was a fleck of carrot in the eye from all Bugs’s munching. What my paw felt like was cheap meat, pummeled to hell then set to simmer in a crockpot.

“We were in Barbados on a shoot,” said Daff. “Two weeks. Just got back last night.”

“Don’t talk to me of Barbados,” said Elmer, who took off his flap-eared hunter’s hat to show a cap of skin so red he looked like a Roman cardinal. “The place was nothing but mosquitoes, heat stroke, and the clap.”

“You were just palling with the wrong crowd,” Daff said to Elmer as he rolled a cigarette. “I had a great time.”

“You were the crowd,” said Elmer, throwing his hat at Daff.

“I bought a shrunken head from a medicine man,” said Bugs. “I hung it from the rearview of the new Studebaker.”

“You heard about Igby,” I said.

“What about Igby?” Bugs asked.

“Found him legless in a storm drain in Hawthorne.”

“D-d-d-dead?” asked Porky.

“No, just peachy.” I should’ve taken it as a omen not to come to the set that morning when instead of Gracie next to me there was the early edition of the Hollywood Reporter, with a front page headline IGBY BERT BINDLE MURDERED, with an accompanying photo of Igby, who looked less like a frog and more like green-egg hash. Gracie’d underlined the grisliest parts with an eyebrow pencil.

“I blame the French,” said Bugs.

“Don’t joke,” I said, grabbing one of the pool cues and poking Bugs in the neck. “He was one of us.” The cue chalk left a blue polka dot in Bugs’s white fur.

“Guess I’ll have to get it dry-cleaned,” he said, trying to brush the powder off his fur, trying to brush away my comment. Bugs always had trouble feeling bad for pain that wasn’t his own.

“He ever get anything after Mr. Toad?” asked Daff, striking a match on Elmer’s hunter’s jacket and setting the tip of his loose cigarette afire.

I shrugged. “Does Campbell’s Soup count?”

“Are you in m-m-m-m-mourning?”

“He wasn’t my mother.”

“But somebody was his mother,” said Pork. I hadn’t thought of that.

“Two is a coincidence, but three is a spree,” said Elmer, absent-mindedly removing his hat and scratching his head. “Christ,” he shouted, jerking his hand up from the burn.

“Four,” I said. “Beaks. No one’s seen him in two weeks.”

For the first time since I’d seen him that day, Bugs’s feet touched the floor. “Beaks?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Thought you heard.” Pork’s face was plastered over with his white gloves. Daffy’s cigarette was dangling from his bill, but he wasn’t smoking. Beaks used to have a regular poker game at his place, a shoebox in a pagoda in Chinatown; he said he lived there because the Chinese made the best jerky, and since Beaks was a vulture, I guess that made sense, but we always suspected it was more Oriental powders and not Oriental meats that kept him there. He spoke very slowly, very perfectly, and his sense of humor was a meat cleaver – unserrated, sharp, heavy. He was the best poker player I’d ever met.

Bugs’s egg-shaped eyes were pooling with tears. “What did Beaks ever do to anybody?”

“What did any of them ever do to anybody?” I said.

“What about Jericho?” asked Bugs, gripping the edge of the pool table, eyes bouncing around the room, looking for further signs of the End Times.

“Jerry’s fine,” I said. “Jerry’s always fine.”

One hour, two beers, and no painkillers later, the bar was picking up, the William Jennings Bryan guy was gone, and me and Cuffy were deep into a game of German whist, talking wounds. He pointed to his left pinkie, forever buttonhooked and the color of a screaming baby. “Stalag-17. Tire iron.”

I lifted my tail, thrice-kinked near the tip. “Two mouse traps, one three-wood. Cameras weren’t even rolling for that last one. Jerry just thought it’d be fun.”

Cuffy pulled down the neck of his A-shirt. Below his collarbone was a patch of raised pink skin that looked like Jersey. “Twelve O’Clock High. Steam burn from an engine on the fuselage.”

I nodded. Steam burns were the worst.

Bad luck good luck bad luck man, Cuffy, kraut-type bruiser, like me born orphan in Baltimore, went west, ate eggs, bench-pressed on Muscle Beach, gained some small fame on the silver screen in the rah-jingo flicks of the late Forties and Fifties, a natural Nazi thug with his chrome dome and blonde handlebar, but shit out of luck when World War II epics gave way to teenie bopper dreck and faggy beatnik mopers. His was the usual decline: littler and littler dirtbag Venice bungalows, rotgut rye, diner waitress whore wife, Mexican tar, the orchard wars, porn acting, bear-baiting, arson, until one night when he blacked out, woke up in a schoolyard in Watts, quit the bottle, found Jesus, sweated and shook himself cold turkey off the smack, cut ties with his own personal Jezebel, begged up the money to buy a bar and started turning a decent profit with the Tinseltown crowd. Judging from the stock floor chatter, the big burger of smoke clinging to the ceiling, the menagerie of boys and badgers and ladies and lemurs all tossing back whiskey like water, I’d say he was doing all right.

I played a spade and flexed my wonky back left foot at him. “Steamroller.”

He lifted his head to reveal a collar of rope burn around his coffee can neck. “Rough love.”

“Speaking of,” I said, “you hear news about the ex?”

He jerked his noggin at the nudie calendar and grunted.

“Ah,” I said, and took my foot off the bar. “Miss March. I see.”

The first sign of Jerry was a thonking at the base of the door, and when it finally opened a crack, my partner squeezed in with an industrial bolt slung under his arm. “The bolt is mightier than the door!” I roared, and the crowd of bigger beings parted. After swinging the thing above his head like some mad Viking, Jerry charged through the gauntlet of wingtips and pumps, then into the clapboard floor he braced pole-vaulter-like the end of the bolt, which bent a hair then flung him barward. I stuck up my tail and he springboarded off of it, somersaulting toward Miss March, who he kissed on the tit before kicking off and backflipping down onto the bar. He bellowed, a burning trail of vowels that lit into the air and singed the frivolity of flirting bigger creatures, except for Cuffy, who beamed with his hockey player’s mouth, gave Jerry a splay-fingered clap, and in a silver jigger glass poured him a rum-and-grenadine. Jerry always liked it sweet. He had a name for the drink, but it couldn’t be repeated in polite company. I reached over the bar, yanked out the LA phone book, and told windburnt surfer on the next stool to scram.

“Walls,” I said, sliding the phone book onto the stool as Jerry stepped off the bar, just as smooth as Aladdin onto his magic carpet. He started slurping the jigger through a coffee straw.

“Hoss,” he said, tipping an imaginary cap at me.

“Half past five beers, Walls.”

“Don’t scold. You sound like a schoolmarm. I was out.” Out meant whores. “How’s the slapper?”

“About how you’d think after a one ton thing fell forty feet on it. But you should see the other guy.”

“Good,” he said, waving Cuffy away for another drink. “Drops hits you faster.”

“What’s that on your ear?” I said to him, licking my good paw then wiping at a patch of dark crusted hair.

“Smidge of this, maybes,” he said, jiggling the jigger glass, his whiskers bristling at my touching.

“Can’t be. It’s already dried.”

“If I’d wanted a bath, I’d a asked for one.” He squinted over at the corner of the room. “Why’s Pork wearing a hat?”

“The rabbit’s birthday.”

“First time I met Bugs, I says to myself, there is somebody would suck poison off the pavement if he thought it would make people like him.”

“I have met people with a steadier hand at the emotional tiller,” I said.

“You know he can’t read?”

“What? Bugs?”

“Couldn’t make out the directions on a box of shampoo.”

“Who said that? I lived with him nigh on two years.”

“Grip buddy of mine at Warner. Anyway, think about it. He never looks at menus – it’s always either the spaghetti and meatball or he just asks the waiter what his favorite is.”

“What about his lines?”

He grabbed the coffee straw, stuck it in the corner of his mouth, and pretended to chew. “What’s up, doc?” he asked in a good impression of Bugs’s yiddy Flatbush drone. He threw the straw back into the jigger glass. “The rest is off the cuff. I’m not saying he’s stupid. I’m saying he’s illiterate.”

It had been a puzzler why Bugs always used to wave the Times away and say newspaper people were all Commies. Or why he hated maps. Or why every book in his Malibu mansion was one of those hollow ones with a gun or a sex toy inside.

“How’s the ball and chain?” Jerry said, still looking over my shoulder at the Looney Tunes crew.

“Get this: I come home early couple days ago and she’s in the shower, but there’s all this tracing paper and charcoal on the dining table, from Hollywood Forever.

“I think that’s kind of foxy.”

“That’s because you’re a creep. Plus yesterday I was trying to find some scissors and in one of the drawers in this envelope were all these clippings of the murders. She even drew little stick figures of the victims.’”

“Like Igby? What’s a stick figure frog look like?”

“Think you’re missing my overall sort of point here.”

“You should be grateful she’s not like most wives with the shopping and the what have you.”

Cuffy parked me another corn beer, and an r-and-g for Jerry. I trailed my good paw over the bar, which now over the burls of the original walnut had an artificial grain cut by knives, glass, fake nails, battery acid, the diamond of Errol Flynn’s wife’s engagement ring, the Host-like watermarks of a million men. My good paw felt it all.

Monty Clift wandered over with Jerry’s bolt-vault and set it next to Jerry’s jigger glass. He’d been standing alone for an hour. “For you,” he said.

“Rusty screw,” Jerry said, fingering its groove.

Monty smiled the way you smile when you don’t want someone to pistol-whip you. He smelled like apricot brandy and frou-frou cologne. “So, Monty,” I said, quick-like, “saw that Misfits flick. Sure as hell make a whamdinger of a bronco buster.”

“And a Nazi retard,” said Jerry. I couldn’t tell if he was poking fun.

“Yeah, that Nuremberg, damn,” I said, even though I’d fallen asleep when Gracie’d taken me. “Full of all that moral … ambiguity.”

“Thanks,” he said, rimming the lip of the brandy glass with his finger. He coughed and backed away. “I need to use the men’s. His fingers made a slow cat’s cradle in front of his chest. “Thanks for the … thanks.”

“He looks so old now,” said Jerry, who was doing a first-rate job catching up with me in the drink tally.

“We all look old now.” But it was a lie: Jerry’s coat was still an ungrayed sable, his eyes like two-tone bucks. They were right to call him the Mickey Rooney of the animal kingdom.

“Monroe once told me he was the only person she knew in worse shape than she was.”

“Marilyn?” I asked.

“Sure as shit ain’t James.”

“When was that?”

“She let me hide in her cleavage when some pimp was chasing me.”

“I call bullshit.”

“Well, okay,” he said. He shrugged, and his whiskers followed suit, rising then falling. “But I did dream it once.”

On the doorstep of midnight, I was on the doorstep of Cuffy’s, Jerry swung babylike over my shoulder and the hot winds whooping down from the hills. When I’d told him to slow it down on the rum, Jerry’d told me he’d wrap me in barbwire and throw me in a trash compactor. Then he blacked out and fell off the bar onto his face.

The day had been warm for March, and now, parched under Mojave winds as hot as exhaust, my paw boiling inside itself, the prospect of hauling my best friend best man best mouse a drunk mile up La Brea was enough to make me cry. By my lonesome I’d a called a cab, but cabbies blab, and after his brush with the law last year, the suits at M-G-M told Jerry to keep his hijinks out of the Hollywood Reporter. So I stepped off the curb, my paw over my head like an overeager school brat, Jerry muttering foul, foul words to the imaginary whores of his head.

Gracie and me lived in the little eyelet of Hollywood that stuck up into Runyon Canyon, and by the time I was crossing Sunset uphill half a mile from home, I hurt so much I thought I might have to bang a stranger’s door till I found someone who’d call me an ambulance. Instead I whispered to Jerry that he owed me one and cursed Leo Shampoo, the doctor M-G-M kept on call at the studio – him, his mother and father, siblings, bridge partners, lodge brothers, his present and future psychics. Rumor was he lost his license after a back alley abortion went south and now he worked off the books for M-G-M. I’ll say this much: he got there fast after that baby grand pancaked my paw, but all the half-sized nitwit did was check my pulse, shove a thermometer in my mouth, and ask how many fingers he was holding up. When I told him where he could stick all four of them, he asked me what my sign was, and I told him I was on the cusp of Gemini and fuck you. I yanked him back down to me by his tie and asked about the hospital, but he chuffed it off and told me the angry pain in my paw was nothing morphine and ylang-ylang tea couldn’t cure. As I staggered to my front door, I distracted myself imagining all manner of heavy things falling from great heights onto that goddamned hack.

The darkness of the living room was the blue-black of Superman’s hair, and I only saved myself from falling over a stack of Gracie’s magazines by hooking a leg of the coffee table with my tail. Before picking my way to the bedroom, I did my best to swaddle Jerry in an armrest cover, then laid him as gently as a Magi onto the ottoman while he mumbled to no one that if she didn’t take off her stockings, he’d do it for her.

The bedroom door was open. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard Gracie was the inspiration for the phrase “sex kitten,” and there she was, in my bed, white queen tangled in lavender sheets, thrashing through the heat lightning of her dreamlife, through the scorched plains and shimmering salt flats of the wordless night. My wife. My nightstand was bare but for the phone and the alarm clock and, thank God, a dark little vial with MORFEEN scrawled atop it. Bugs Bunny and Leo Shampoo would make quite the team. That homonculus of a doctor told me to take two drops when I got home, so I dropped six, wishing him deep pain as each one splashed on my tongue, tasting of maraschino juice left months too long outside the icebox. Easing myself horizontal, I rested my paw on the nightstand, and after a minute, I didn’t think I was going to die, and after three, I felt like a soap bubble floating on top another soap bubble, and after ten, I thought I might name my first child after that dapper little physician.

Just as the train of sweet drugged sleep was pulling into the station, the phone rang, and I almost knocked it off the nightstand. From the living room Jerry yelled, “Balls!” and Gracie moaned and rolled over, the heat pouring off her like musk. I picked it off the cradle before it could ring again.

“I can’t take it any more, Thomas. This world is too much for me. I’m going to end it. This time, I’m really going to end it. I’m standing on the edge of the deck looking out over the gorge, and I must say, it’s a pretty nice night to die.”

“Two things, Bugs. First, you don’t have a phone out by the deck, so you can’t be looking out –”

“I could be there in five seconds, ten seconds tops.”

“And second, you live on a hill, not the edge of a gorge, so if you threw yourself off, the worst you could do is break a leg.”

“Harsh, Thomas. Harsh. You might just have blood on your hands tonight.”

In the years since I’d first met him, Bugs had built around himself a carnival of a life, big and bright and boisterous, but being a Coney Island boy, he’d started with the Cyclone, right smack dab in the middle, and instead of wandering around enjoying what he’d made, I don’t think he’d ever got down from that rickety old roller coaster. Someday a bolt would come loose and he’d go flying right off. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t tonight: normal friends would sometimes send singing telegrams, drop off trinkets and oddities for me at the studio, but Bugs’s way of saying he was thinking of me was to call me at 4 a.m. with a gun pointed at his head.

For Edison, genius was one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration; for Bugs Bunny it was one per cent desperation and ninety-nine per cent affectation.

“What’s yanking you around, Bugs?” As I adjusted to the darkness, the mirror Gracie had screwed to the ceiling some months back had been uncloudying itself from a dark pool into the two of us sprawled limbs akimbo like some Japanese word, and damned if she wasn’t slinkier than when I’d married her, while my fur was stiff with dirt and sweat and rum and beer, and my eyes were a battleground between blood and phlegm.

“The suits at Warner are talking retirement, Thomas.”

I inch-wormed myself up until I was shoved back against the headboard. “Balderdash. You’re Bugs Bunny. You’re like our George Washington.” Then I heard a bunch of weepy hiccupy nose and mouth sounds on the other end.

“Thomas, that might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“Why’re they doing it?”

“Money’s tight. And the kids don’t like the newer ones as much. Figure they’ll make more re-running the old ones on TV. Syndimication.”

“How’s the money work?”

“Warner gets eighty, the writers and directors get ten, I get four.”

“How big’s the pie you’re cutting from?” Gracie’s dream whimpers were starting to make me grind my teeth in lust, and her tail, a charmed snake, began dancing up and down my leg.

“Big as a manhole cover.”

“So you’re telling me you’re getting big money to sit on your ass?”

“I liked seeing myself at the movies.”

“No more jumping out of a hole for fifty takes? No more shit-for-brains director? It’s a dream is what it is, Bugs. A dream.” My tongue felt unruly and fat and lost, like the retarded kid in class you always throw trash at.

“I have a nightmare, Thomas: me sitting at the Hilton on a Tuesday afternoon, a pint of gin sloshing around my insides, watching the shadows get longer and praying Daff calls up with something to do. That’s not just boring, Thomas. That’s apopoclipse.”

“Bugs, I’m too doped up to be subtle, so I’m just going to ask: can you read?”

There was a pause. “Thomas, I like to think of myself as a man who can come to his own opinions.”

“Bugs, once in a while I miss having you around, and I’ll lay this one-time offer out there: what’s say I come to your place sometime, and if you like, I teach you how to read.”

More of the hiccupy, mouthy noises, and then Bugs snuffling, “That’d be just aces, Thomas.”

“All right, Bugs. Call you tomorrow. I settled the phone back in the cradle. I stuck my paw behind the wood pineapple that screwed into each end of the headboard, and even though my eyes were gritty with tired, the brain behind it was idling like the keys had got stuck in the ignition. So I used the trick I always did to help me go to sleep: imagining myself beating the shit out of Mickey Mouse with a Louisville Slugger.

Next morning, the sun through the undrawn Venetians woke me to a landmine of a hangover. Gracie was gone, but so was the pain in my paw, which made me so happy I almost didn’t mind retching as I three-legged it out into the living room, past Gracie’s spaceman chairs and the Cracker Jack box of a coffee table, which I’d told Gracie was too plain to be expensive until she told me it was made in Denmark, by Denmark people. All that was left of Jerry was a mouse-shaped dent on the ottoman.

In the kitchen I mixed a Bloody Mary, equal parts vodka, tomato juice, and Tabasco: after years of Jerry pranking me, spiking my drinks with everything from pickle juice to iodine to rat poison – which sent me to the ER and did almost kill me – I mixed my Marys strong and I mixed my Marys hot. Since the morphine tasted so bad by itself, I topped the drink off with a quick squirt, tossed in a pawful of salt, stirred it with a steak knife, and downed it like I was being timed.

In the bathroom I faced the john, set the hurt paw on the sink, which was as clean and green as an after-dinner mint, and fished myself out of my drawers. Gracie had taped the obits for Beaks and Igby and Screwy and Felix to the mirror, and I almost tore them down. I didn’t want to start my day with that. Four cartoon stars in six weeks, and with all the LAPD had come up with, I was starting to think they were all relatives of Leo Shampoo.

I finished, shook off the last drips, flushed, slid into a sweat suit, and when I saw the Caddy was gone, I shrugged and sighed, jogged the downhill half mile to Hollywood Boulevard and caught the 109 to Pasadena.

The bus was lousy with gentle, cautious creatures – mothers out for Saturday morning specials, a family of gray squirrels, a pair of Chinamen in lampshade hats, a couple sleepy hounds probably just off the night shift, children who sat facing forward with their knees together, a glum frog reading his horoscope. Some seemed to recognize yours truly, and it struck me that at that very minute thousands of others across the nation were also watching me, on their own personal devil boxes (although my syndication deal was nowhere near as good as Bugs’s) and perchance they stared on the bus because I seemed to bilocate. But as I shuffled back until I found enough real estate on the overhead bar, it seemed more likely they gawked because I was like the painting that Brit dandy kept up in the attic so he could look young forever, except in reverse: it was the me on the bus that looked like something we’d drag in, and the 2D version that was all everlastingly bright and perky.

That eternal life we called cartooning and the way it worked was this: they’d shoot our little episodes on 16mm, then a stable of artists and illustrators would blow up each frame and recreate it with pencils and watercolors, simplifying the lines, flattening the surfaces, mixing variegations of hue into one consistent color, and just generally making it more visually digestible to the average ten-year-old in Kenosha, and more importantly, his parents, who were more likely to let Junior watch a cat and mouse beat the shit out of each other if they could tell him it wasn’t not real. Then the illustrators and artists order the stills all in a row like a giant flip book and run them in every theater and now television across the country. Then they give us sacks of money.

I stepped off a few blocks from the set into the bobby-pinned world of Pasadena, a suburban hell of trikes and elms and fathers pushing mowers and waving to each other as they slipped mindlessly into middle age. It was the sort of place freedom went to die. Outside the Cape Cod M-G-M used for its more domestic shoots the grips and gaffers and best boys and cameramen were sorting their gear, and from their crazy-legged walks and faces more slack than pained, I could tell they were drunk, not hung over, which was good for them but troublesome for both their future marital prospects and for me: their sloppiness meant forgetting to cushion walls and dull fork tines, meant retakes of me falling down stairs and sitting on pins. Because even though they fudged things here and there, what the cartooners didn’t do was make up something that hadn’t happened, so when Junior sees Jerry drop a hot iron onto me, the lump growing from my noggin is real.

Spike was shadowboxing out back by the pool, his white coat gleaming in the growing heat, mumbling, “Take that … and that … and that …” until he spotted me and hustled over. Jogging in place, he beamed and smacked me on the shoulder and asked how Death was doing. I was a tad embarrassed he remembered from a few weeks back I’d told him my fists were named Death and Pestilence. More embarrassing was that the morphine made me feel like I was wading through thickening aspic. “I named mine, too,” he said, putting up his dukes. “St. Michael,” he said, shaking the right, “and St. Patrick,” squeezing the left into a coconut-sized ball.

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s good.”

“Hey, you going to Igby’s funeral?” he asked, uppercutting, dancing around me in a way that was not helping my headache one bit.

“Didn’t know about it.”

“It’s in Sherman Oaks. Our Lady of Perpetual Help.”

“Didn’t know Igby was Catholic.”

“Lot of frogs are,” he said, ducking under an invisible punch. His breath smelled of mint-flavored bone – even though they would get bleached in cartooning, Spike liked to make sure his teeth looked clean on camera.

“Hell of a ways, Sherman Oaks.”

“I think I’m going to take the kids. It’s important for them to understand that life is short, and precious.”

“Right,” I said.

We were finishing up an episode, the gist of which was me auditioning to be an ivories man at a swanky club, hence the falling baby grand, but in order to pay for the tux I needed to perform, I had to steal the birthday money Jerry had given Spike. With most of the scene done, the only big sequence left was a long chase ending at the pool, which they’d just drained. Blotches of water at the bottom were shrinking down to nothing, and the air above was sashaying, stinging my nose with its heat and its chlorine. While I was eying possible maneuvers, angles, and exit strategies, our director Headley St. John came striding around the corner in his tight black suit and Barry Goldwater glasses, clasping his hands together and calling me by my Christian name. Because our episodes were seven-minute shorts that had almost no dialogue, little need for direction, starred a hardscrabble tomcat and a psychotic, alcoholic mouse, and eventually got cartooned over anyway, the show over the years had had a carousel of sparkly-eyed expat directors wanting a starter job with an established brand. Headley, who’d directed the last four, was the latest. But at least he was British, not French or South American, which meant I could understand him, and he didn’t try to kiss me on the cheek every time he saw me. Plus he wasn’t pushing boring novels on me about the unbearable boringness of life or trying to convince me to see a shrink about what the last director called my abandonment issues.

“Thomas!” Headley called out, even though I was about five feet away. “Thomas! How is your paw?”

“Better,” I said, waving it around like a tennis racket. “Morphine. Hell of a drug.”

“Oh, Thomas,” he chuckled.

“Any word from Jerry?” I asked, checking the watch I wasn’t wearing.

“I was just about to ask you that.”

Just then Spike jogged over, still shadow-boxing.

“Saint John,” he said, letting loose a little jab that landed inches short of Headley’s long nose.

“Oh, my,” he said, stepping back.

“Ooh, sorry,” said Spike, grimacing. Besides never remembering that Headley’s last name rhymed with Rin-Tin, Spike thought that the St. meant Headley was a clergyman of some type, and that he was a direct descendant of author of the fourth Gospel; being a daily mass Catholic, that was big rocks for Spike, and he treated the director like a walking saint.

“Spike, you seen Jerry?”

“Nope.”

I peered into the pool, where one of the grunts was flopping down a pale blue pad.

“You still planning to jump?” Spike asked. “What with the paw and all?”

“Thomas, do you think we ought to have looksee?”

I motor-boated the air and unwrapped the gauze from about the splint. The plywood boards fell out, and there was my paw, twice as big as usual and the color of an undercooked hash.

“Smeg,” said Headley, rippling his upper lip.

“My sentiments exactly.”

“How’s it feel?” asked Spike as a limo idled up to the curb outside the house.

“Somebody die?” asked Spike.

“Just my dreams,” I said, as we all three shuffled toward it like zombies in the heat. The chauffeur opened the door, and out stepped Mr. Noggles Schmear, an M-G-M VP we all joked was half Jew, half lobster, followed by a lackey humping a case of what looked like genuwine French champagne. His face red as a hothouse tomato, beaming like we were his sons returned from the war, Mr. Schmear grabbed a bottle from the case and out from somewhere behind his back pulled a saber. I was about to turn tail and shove Spike out at him when he in his Delancey accent yelled, “Boys! The Academy just announced its nominees, and guess what cat-and-mouse combo are up for one?” He tossed me the chilled bottle, which my rubbery morphined fingers almost dropped, and although I’m sure he wanted the bared teeth in his head to look more exhilarated than raging, I was not too keen when he swung the saber and hewed half the bottle’s neck right off, missing my good paw’s finger by a dime’s width. Then he squeezed my bad paw, and I could have clocked him with the jizzing bottle right then.

“I know, Tom,” he said, mistaking my tears of pain for joy, “it’s been too long. But we are back now. Goddamn it but we are back.”

“Huzzah!” said Headley, from Spike’s headlock.

Mr. Schmear wrapped on the bottle with his fat pink knuckles. “Veuve Clicquot. Only the best for – hey, where’s my favorite rodent?” he said, just as Jerry out from nowhere popped over the lackey’s back, stuck a landing on the case of champagne, and threw his arms into the air like Mae West.

“Har!” shouted Mr. Schmear, doing a weird high-kneed hillbilly dance over to Jerry and the struggling minion as I glugged down the bubbly, which stung my throat with its cold and its fizz. The humans did love Jerry. Mr. Schmear rubbed Jerry’s ear like he was testing a bolt of cloth at the tailor’s and took the bottle from me and tilted the sundered neck toward Jerry, who although he wasn’t much taller than the Veuve, drank most of it in one long draught. I was beginning to regret the full squirt of morphine – everything was so bright and smooth I felt like I was living a cartoon, and my limbs felt less like a part of my body and more like something I was trying to marionette around.

“Hope you’ve all left April ninth open on your social calendars,” said Mr. Schmear as the crew gathered about, cursing happily and clamoring at the lackey for the dewy bottles. With all the corks shooting off, I felt like a gang of kids with pop guns was chasing me.

We’d had a streak of Oscars in the Fifties, a decade as sweet as Coca-Cola, but for years, not even a nomination, and the voice in the back of my head whispered we’d lost the magic. I hoped the news would make Gracie proud. Certainly the crew seemed pleased as punch to know me and Jerry, sidling over, giving their pointer fingers for Jerry to shake and telling me they were real sorry about the baby grand.

“Dust off your tuxedoes, boys,” cackled Mr. Schmear, showing off his molars. “Shine up your spats. They best be gleaming on the red carpet.”

“Who’s that?” asked Spike, pointing up at a dark shape perched near the twiggy top of an grand old elm tree across the street. It was a man wearing a black topcoat and bowler, no-handedly straddling a thin bone of a branch without breaking it. I’d spied him a minute before, but I wasn’t sure if he was real or just another piece of my morphine fantasia, along with the grass that was telling me my fortune and the clouds that bore the faces of all the people I’d ever betrayed. When the man in the bowler saw that we saw him, he monkeyed his way to a lower branch, dropped twenty feet to the ground, and hurried away.

“Goddamn pinkos,” chuffed Mr. Schmear, making a gesture at the suit I guessed was either vulgar or Masonic. “First they steal our life essences, now they’re snooping on our secret forms of creative entertainment.” I’d known the man long enough to sense a monologue coming, in the same way you know for a half-second of exhilaration and terror that you’re about to sneeze, but it subsided, and instead he shoved his chin – which really was just the bottommost part of his flaming face – toward the backyard, and asked no one in particular if he could kick the tires a little. Even though Headley was a newbie who’d spent most of his life in schools that made you wear ties with shields on them, he was still the director, and so I broke my eyes from the fleeing suit to Headley’s rice-white face, but before he could stammer anything out, Jerry said that his casa was Mr. Schmear’s anytime he liked. I rubbed my eyebrows and locked my jaw, thankful the morphine was slowing everything to half speed and rounding the edges off all my feeling – I’d been planning on telling Headley how about we save the end of the chase for another day or two, for the paw’s sake. Headley was terrified of Jerry, and every day on set was like Yalta, with me playing Roosevelt to his Churchill and Jerry’s Stalin, so Headley would have agreed to the delay without a second thought. But Mr. Schmear, that artless tycoon, that blubbery beet, decided he wanted to be the firsthand witness to my pain.

In the backyard, the three of us limbered up like always: first we got down on all fours a few feet apart and started hopping over and sliding under each other like God was playing three card monte with us. After a couple panting minutes of that, I jumped onto Spike’s shoulders, then Jerry jumped onto mine, then Spike lifted his paw and I hopped up, then Jerry did the same with me, then with a timing we’d honed over the years, Spike and I squatted deep and pushed in unison, which flung me ten feet up but Jerry so high he became just a black fly hovering toward the yolky sun, before zooming back down and onto my good paw.

“That is Oscar-worthy action!” hooted Mr. Schmear, whose girth was straining the diving board, his 6EEE wingtips dangling above the chlorine fumes, his lackey standing behind holding a parasol over his overripe strawberry of a head. Headley stood off near the shallow end, thumbing an unlit Chesterfield and trying to look useful.

Jerry rolled a medicine ball from out behind the shed, and after he clambered up, Spike and I tossed it back and forth, the mouse balanced on top. The paw was ginger, but not so bad I couldn’t catch the medicine ball, so I decided to strike while the iron was hot and the morphine thrumming along: “Spike, Walls, let’s go and put on a show.”

We picked up the episode where we left off: Jerry speeding inside after hoisting the baby grand with a crane and almost killing me with it in the front drive. Now, with a camera near the stairs catching everything, Headley called Action and I wheeled after Jerry across the living room, forever on his heels, then slid face first toward the mouse hole cut into the room’s baseboard, the carpet burning across my chest, finally accordioning into the wall just after Jerry slipped inside. I’d done it a thousand times but goddamn if each one didn’t hurt a little worse than the last. I scampered toward the closet and came back with a fumigator pump that read Mustard Gas on the side. After emptying the harmless green fumes into Jerry’s hole, I stepped back with a death’s head grin and stretched myself out on the sofa. When Jerry emerged a second later wearing a miniature gas mask, I hurled the pump at him and the chase began again, first over the upright piano’s keys in a back-and-forth boogie-woogie duet we’d perfected over the years (along with a couple of Sousa marches, “In the Mood,” and the introitus to Mozart’s Requiem, which was I admit a little slow and deathy for anything but fooling around off-camera). With three limbs instead of four and a head floating in morphine vapor, I was a bit behind the beat, but because of the good news about the Oscars, as we were finishing the last notes of the twelve bar, I flashed Jerry a finger-moustache too quick for the cameras to catch, and all at once we ascended into the “The Ride of the Valkyries,” which seemed appropriate considering Jerry’s gas mask, and as he hopscotched that Nazi leitmotif, he sang “Kill the wab-bit, kill the wab-bit,” then while I took over the main theme, he hit the first flute part’s high F trill with a machine gunning of his tiny feet before hopping off and hustling into the kitchen. Almost before I slid behind the swinging door, Jerry’d secured the high ground atop the counter at the knife rack, and he hurled them all at me — steak knives and bread knives, butcher knives and boning knives, oyster knives and carving knives, and from the way I had to boogie-woogie myself to dodge them as they whiffed past and skittered onto the tile, it didn’t seem like he was trying to miss.

When the knives ran out, I reached for a cast iron skillet hanging from a peg, to line drive him into the fridge, forgetting for a terrible moment that first lesson of boxing: never leave your body open, a canvas your opponent could paint with pain. The knife stand was indeed empty, but an innocuous wedge of Parmesan was leaning against it coquettishly. With a flick of his toe, Jerry chipped it into the air, caught it, and whipped at my head with a full leg-kick follow through. But if I could dodge a steak knife, I could sure as hell dodge a piece of cheese, so I started to duck, bending at the knees, knowing the worse the Parmesan would do is give me a crew cut. Leaning forward on one leg, Jerry winked, and my eyes dropped to his fingers, which were curled up toward his hand like a claw. Knuckleball.

In mid-flight, the wedge dropped, righted itself, and started corkscrewing, shaking off so much smell I felt like I was being assaulted by an Italian restaurant. Trying to track it was dizzying, but as it flew toward me, I knew I had to guess, so I jumped spread-legged like a cheerleader, hoping it would slide beneath me, but just as I left the ground, the cheese was buoyed by some unseen force and it rose, spearing me in the crotch.

In my line of work, you learn to be a connoisseur of pain – knowing the tinsel of regained circulation from the throb of built-up pulse, distinguishing the flash of flame-burn from the sizzling parasitic seep of acid, sniffing out the difference between the tang of a dislocated shoulder from the bone-grind of a joint that’s spent its lifelong allowance of cartilage. You learn to distance yourself through analysis. But as any boy who’s ever picked up a mitt can tell you, that’s impossible when you’ve taken one to the balls. You don’t just hurt, you feel evacuated, manhood surrendered, your self slurped out through yourself, the interior hollowed until you’re only an outside. I crumbled to my knees, mouth snatching for air, while Jerry leaped toward the ceiling, grabbed one of the overhead fan blades, and timed his letting-go well enough that it shot him out through the open window. Behind me the cameramen were chuckling. I stood, gasping. The constitutional horror I felt was resolving its component parts: the background of black void, a single sting in the family jewels, and a pull along the veiny underside, like a rubber band yanked too many times, until its elasticity was spirited away. That was a new one.

I coughed, listing to starboard, and stumbled into the paparazzi flash of sunlight.

My attention was directed by bad fake-snoring to Spike, pretending to sleep by his doghouse, which had been painted with a drippy Happy Birthday and brightened with a whole bouquet of red balloons. Fortunately Headley’d had the sense to eighty-six Mr. Schmear from the board, and the two were watching the action from behind the white picket fence, Noggles goggling as Jerry flew over the breadth of the dry pool and I tried to remember what I was supposed to do next.

Headley looked like he always did during takes, doubled up in his head about the fact that the better the episodes went, the longer he’d direct them, and the longer he directed them, the less likely he’d ever create a film of true artistic grandeur, which far as I could tell meant flicks about skinny boys with very purposeful hairdos reading philosophy and complaining about the pointlessness of the universe to their girlfriends, who were always improbably curvy and saucer-eyed and eager to take off their tight sweaters to comfort their beaus.

My groin was having an existential crisis of its own, the fumes of the injury rising up into my guts, threatening to shove my Bloody Mary up my gullet. The basic blocking we always did for our longer sequences had vanished from my head. So I did what any cat worth his salt does when he sees a mouse: I started chasing. Jerry’d alighted on the far rim of the pool as gently as an angel, then started sprinting into a long wheel route. God he was fast. Watching his body shrink through the pastel universe of a Pasadena backyard, some ancient cattishness reasserted itself inside me: while I was as bipedal as not, two-leggers were thinkers, not killers, and if you want to catch something, you need a cheetah, not a chimp. I leapt into my ancestry and onto all fours, clenching my jaw at the pain the hard ground shot through my bad paw, trying to distract myself by thinking about something besides my crotch, paw, and stomach. As I galloped around the pool, I remembered the Oscars, the competing bouquets of the starlets’ perfumes in lobby of the Civic Auditorium, the impasto of satin dresses, the loose smiles of beautiful drunk people who would get lucky whether they won or lost that night. It was like an orgy in Macy’s. I couldn’t wait.

I was catching up to Jerry, who was racing toward the California Fan Palm that towered over the yard, a tree the cartooners hated because they always had to redraw it into a many-branched oak. His foreshortened body was flying toward the trunk, and any other creature I knew would’ve crashed, but Jerry pushed off on his right foot, translating his momentum with all the grace of Del Shofner into an inside turn, grabbing his crotch at me with a wink then sprinting toward the doghouse. I was not Jerry, and a second later, when I reached the tree, I had to loop wide around it, feeling my paws flap at the ground to gain purchase, whipping up the grass in waves, as though it were a bunched carpet.

Spike was still fake-sleeping, an Alp of a dog, and Jerry hopped over him at the last second, while I, remembering my duty, my role – the earthbound clod, the creature of dirt always flailing at the creature of air, failing to grasp him – I obligingly crashed into the starboard flank of Spike’s ribcage, bouncing off as though he were a trampoline set on its side. Earlier in the episode I’d eaten Spike’s pork chops and stuffed dynamite into his birthday cake to try and blow Jerry up, and as Jerry watched behind the doghouse with the glee of the devil on your shoulder, I gave Spike my toothiest, most apologetic grin, trying not to let on that I was having a hard time standing up. But for the Spike of the show, far meaner than the real Spike who’d internalized the Gospel message to forgive your brother seventy times seven, it was a clear case of three strikes and you’re out. So that linebacker of a bulldog started after me as I chased Jerry toward the pool while breathing deep, trying to keep the stars out of my eyes that portended a blackout. I couldn’t do a re-take.

Offscreen one tech untethered the birthday balloons and another blew them toward us with an industrial fan. We three made three passes around the pool, and each time new constellations appeared in my vision, as though the evening were fading into night, but I couldn’t stop. Finally on the fourth circuit, Jerry screeched to a halt at the board, just as the balloons were lazing by, and raced down the blue runway, springing off the edge to catch one of the low-floating ones. Spike stopped at the edge but I followed, Tom the Persistent, leaping off the lip of the board, grasping at the pretty tails of the bright red balloons, missing them all as Jerry waved to me wickedly, a stowaway on an airborne flotilla of red dirigibles. For a moment, suspended twenty feet above the bottom of the dry pool, I ran in place, before that bitch gravity got me for the second day in a row, my happy red world jump-cutting to a cruel chemical blue, but as I spread my arms into the Iron Cross and prepared to take my licking like a man, I could not but smile, taking the nomination as a harbinger that my world would redden again soon, the deep lipsticky vermillion of the red carpet, the same color as the bow my Grace wore that first day I met her, at this very set, the blooming red of our deepest insides, of glory and terror and lust. Pain I could handle. What startled me was the opposite – as I flew down toward the bottom of a pool the color of a cartoon sky, wind brushing past the fur of my face, my paw felt like a grilled bratwurst about to burst, my nicotined lungs were scorched from the running, and my head was a shrieking teakettle. But in my groin, the seat of myself, I felt something scarier than hurt. Nothing. I didn’t feel a damn thing.

In the Eighties, practically no one left the country, unless they were soldiers or members of the E Street Band or had won a Caribbean sweepstakes vacation. Beyond the expense of travel, other nations were strange: their food smelled licoricey, felt wormy, and tasted like lime peel and ginger ale and fire; their clothes were baggy and bright and rarely made of denim; and in their languages, they sounded like ducks or owls or wind chimes in a gale. But the Olympics were a time when the differences between cultures seemed to melt away: everyone was wearing some form of skintight Lycra, no one was shown eating food, and the interviews were all conducted in English. Although no one knew what to think of other countries, they wanted to believe the best. We were, after all, the world. As such, friends would gather in their bungalows and A-frames and Cape Cods and ranch houses to watch athletes with short-tempered coaches and no body fat reassure the viewers that beneath their cable-knit sweaters, insurance policies and love handles, they too were animals, creatures of sinew and bone, stone and flame. At these Olympic get-togethers, the friends sampled rice noodles and couscous and sake, played steel drums badly, learned the melody of the Angolan national anthem. A few even wore dashikis, and not in a peacenik, Frank Zappa sort of way.

Even livelier were the Olympic villages, self-contained cities constructed for the athletes’ use during the course of the Games. The villages were cultural portmanteaus, the juxtapositions jarring yet apposite: an onion-domed minaret might stand nose-to-nose with a pinecone-like pagoda, while at their feet perched conical goatskin tents imported from Cameroon. In the evenings, the French and Chinese delegations often hosted poetry readings, which were poorly attended, but the Jamaican DJ parties were legendary, odd testosterone-fueled scrums of reggae and dub, the hundreds of Olympians with overdeveloped shoulder muscles drinking seltzer water and trying very hard to look like people whose best friends were not their mothers and personal trainers. Only Brian Boitano (see Brian Boitano Eighties) seemed wholly at ease, shimmying through the crowd in a black Lyrca body suit that looked remarkably like his skate costume. Hey, he’d say, munching on some complimentary soy nuts, Buffalo Soldier! I love this one. Tossing the rest of the soy nuts into his mouth, he’d grab a pair of nearby Canadian curlers by the hand and start a conga line.

The central squares were the villages’ most boisterous locales, the action there an ethnologist’s dream. The Ukraine’s paddle-handed female swimmers could be found tossing Frisbees with the Haitian 4×400 meter relay team, trying without success to goad the lithe runners into a game of Slavic vs. Caribbean ultimate. Around the squares’ picnic tables, American gymnasts – with bangs so protruding they doubled as sun visors – would try to explain the plot of Dallas to Nigerian sprinters, while Czechoslovakian kayakers and Mongolian freestyle wrestlers might discuss the relative merits of U2 and the Police (see African Benefit Concert Eighties), the Romantic Czechoslovakians preferring Bono’s vocal gymnastics and the ambiguity of subject – after all, what was “With or Without You” about? God? A lover? Melanie Griffith? – while the Mongolians, raised on the merciless Gobi steppe, found solace in Sting’s poppy delivery while also appreciating the underlying nihilism of his sex-heavy lyrics. And no matter what time of day or night, the Russians, regardless of their sport, could be found in the center of the square playing chess. At first they challenged the athletes of other nations, but their victories were so quick they made the games unenjoyable for either player, even after the Russians volunteered to begin several pieces down. The last straw was a game between a Soviet ski jumper and Brian Boitano, in which the skier began the game with nothing but a king and three pawns and still bested Boitano in seven moves. After that, the Russians played only themselves.

In the crucible of the Olympic village, romance would sometimes flash, as a Swedish decathlete caught the eye of an Argentine equestrian striding flushed from the stables in her jodhpurs and lambskin boots. The difficulty of such encounters was occasionally heightened by political danger; once a Soviet high-jumper began an affair with a well-known American diver, and the first night he left her room, a troop of KGB guards wrestled him to the ground, asked him the name of his handler and his opinion of the Sicilian Defence. When he responded that he could handle himself and had never been to Sicily, they were about to inject him with a lethal dose of adrenalin, but the Soviet high-jumper opened the door, called them off, and explained to the diver that one must always use the Sicilian Defence when White opens the match with an advance of the Queen’s pawn.

But of course, the families watching from thousands of miles away saw none of this, although they suspected the world was darker and more complicated than the telecasts and predictable interviews revealed. Watching the Olympics in living rooms and dens, party guests would pause over their meals whenever any athletes exchanged words before an event or after, pale rice noodles dangling from their mouths, chopsticks balanced awkwardly between thumb and middle finger, searching for the deeper connections that bound them all together. Many recall the remarkable women’s 100m dash of 1988, when after winning the gold medal the Nigerian sprinter turned to the American who had placed second, embraced her, and began a long conversation that continued as they walked their victory lap hand in hand. Viewers tried to read the sprinters’ lips, eager to learn the truths housed in triumph, unable to know that the Nigerian was in fact asking her American counterpart: Who Shot J.R.?

Russian Eighties

The USSR spanned eleven time zones, which was a great source of pride for its citizens and premiers alike. Sometimes a member of the Politburo, watching the red sun fall past the onion domes of Red Square, would dial a Kamchatka number at random, and ask whatever bleary-eyed oil man or bureaucrat answered whether the sun was indeed rising over the Bering Sea. When, after a few moments, the sleepy easterner said, “Yes, yes,” the Politburo member back in Moscow would smile, spinning the antique globe by his desk, and say, “Good. Very good.” Russians only spoke Russian when Americans were present, to intimidate them – to each other they spoke English in growling monotone.

Naturally Americans were concerned, their states stretched thin over only six time zones. A sense of superiority was a longstanding national attribute, and a nearly two-to-one Soviet-American advantage was unacceptable. Everyone demanded the “time zone gap” be closed. To remedy the problem, Americans tried numerous tactics. Highly trained operatives parachuted into Siberia with outstanding vodka and thick gold coins in an effort to incite rebellion. Locals agreed on the condition that the Americans best them in chess, and although the Russians guzzled all the vodka before the first castling, the Americans, ignorant of the Sicilian Defence, captured nary a pawn (see Olympics Eighties). Another idea was to subdivide America’s time zones into twelve, but for the week it was implemented, chaos reigned as citizens set fire to clock towers and pounded their watches with the soles of their shoes, culminating in the Half Past Denver riots of 1985.

Direct conflict with the Soviets was impossible, since this was a cold war, and a hot war would require 1) a draft and 2) hardship. Hardship was unpopular in the Eighties, and no one much liked the idea of a draft, since it would decrease sexual opportunities (see Sex Drink Eighties)and weaken households against the sociopaths always waiting to dismember and eviscerate the well-adjusted (see Horror Eighties). The United States might have settled for a less militaristic advantage, such as athletics, but throughout the decade, the Russians, with their manly female swimmers, hard-jawed gymnasts and elven figure skaters, took back to Moscow many kilos of gold, silver, and bronze (see Olympic Eighties, Brian Boitano Eighties). Senators and shot-putters alike had visions of the Russians crowded into their hangar-sized gymnasia, heat shushing through vents, floury clouds of chalk blooming from the claps of their meaty hands, every man, woman, and child sporting a blood-red leotard, performing the Iron Cross and handstand pushups, cleaning and pressing barbells bowed with shiny plates.

Ultimately, government officials decided that the only way to close the time zone gap was to eradicate the Soviet Union altogether. Many words were spat about a wall in Germany, but everyone in the First World knew it was merely a symbol – the real barrier, the true wall, was the Iron Curtain itself, that three thousand kilometer shroud fashioned from the ore of the Krivoi Rog and the Kersh peninsula, and hung from God knows what as it Geigered its way from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Nothing – neither person nor manufactured good nor idea – could pass from one side to the other without the imprimatur of the Politburo. Only one solution presented itself: Melt the Iron Curtain. Accordingly, the CIA purchased a hundred thousand acetylene torches, which they gave to democratically-minded citizens of the nations whose eastern borders rubbed against the Curtain, and at a perfectly coordinated moment of Slavic twilight, the citizens pressed the sharp flames into the metal. In satellite images it appeared that the Earth’s molten core was exploding to the surface along an immense fault line in central Europe. The Americans had also given out a certain number of cinderblock-sized mobile phones, and some time after sunset, when holes were growing in the wall as though it were a shabby coat left too long unmothballed, one of the operatives rang an Austrian stationed outside Bratislava. The Austrian pulled the mobile phone from his satchel, yanked out its antenna with his teeth, and held it with both hands to his ear. Peering through a gap the size of a bicycle wheel, the Austrian said hello, and that he was there. The CIA operative asked if he could see anything. In the foreground was nothing but a dull tableau of skiffs floating atop the lazy Morava. But the Austrian was also an amateur astronomer, and after setting the phone at his feet, he pulled a telescope from his satchel and peered through the hole. “I see a man,” he shouted down at the mobile phone, “at a window. Holding a telephone. A globe is spinning. He’s playing chess against himself. He’s winning.”

African Benefit Concert Eighties

What did people know about Africa? Very little. There were drums. Ancient melodies. Rains, which they blessed. It was waiting there for them. But no one was exactly sure they wanted to go. There were reports of glottal stops, ten-year-olds with Kalashnikovs, strange diseases old and new, a distinct lack of air conditioning. On late night TV flashed photos of ribby, potbellied children who could eat for a month for less than the price of a pair of fuzzy dice. So thousands sent monthly checks, blessing the children down in Africa.

It was at just such a moment that the African Benefit Concert was born. In this case, the check-writer was Bono, serving the second of two nonconsecutive terms as President of the Eighties (see Brian Boitano Eighties), sitting at an Edwardian rolltop in Cleveland, sending his $3.67 to eight-year-old Gabriela Ngangi, c/o the St. Claire Children’s Relief Fund. As always, Bono sent with the check a complimentary U2 concert shirt, smiling at the photo taped above the desk of Gabriela wearing an oversized T silkscreened with the image of an angry Caucasian child. As much as Gabriela seemed to be enjoying her memorabilia, as well as her millet and potable water, Bono knew she would be happier still if she had a chance to see him perform live. Being a man with a wide and disparate network of friends, Bono began calling them all: men in double-breasted suits who had “constituencies” and “interns”; matrons with blown-out hair who spent most of their days in Lycra leotards, women who had “time” and “money” and husbands they could cajole or guilt or blackmail into assisting them; other mulleted rockers who might have had similarly charitable thoughts as they glanced up from their own rolltop desks to admire photos of little smiling Mateo or Dominic or Gloria wearing shirts emblazoned with giant lips or drooling demons or the phrase “I Touch Myself”; and of course, the Archbishop Desmond Tutu. On the advice of the South African cleric and others who had actually been to Africa, Bono soon decided to move the venue from Johannesburg to New York and London, cities where it was less likely that black musicians and/or concertgoers would be arrested and/or shot.

The transatlantic concert was a televisual extravaganza. The telecast was simultaneous, the venues in New York and London connected via satellite, and at certain moments, the enormous screens would show a live video of the other venue’s act. The necessary technology was byzantine, but NASA engineers had stepped in to oversee the project. Besides the technical challenges, Bono feared a Soviet death ray might destroy the satellite mid-concert. The NASA engineers told him the Soviets probably had bigger fish to fry, and moreover that shooting down a satellite was an extraordinarily difficult task. But Bono’s dreams were plagued with TVs falling silent, lasers as red as the Soviet flag, stellar explosions as fiery gold as the hammer and sickle. He grew so desperate that he called his nemesis and fellow balladeer Sting to ask him to intervene with the Russians, since he had written a song about them. Sting told him he didn’t actually have any Russian friends. Bono mentioned that the Archbishop Desmond Tutu was his friend. Sting said he would see what he could do, then visited the Russian embassy inLondon, imploring the ambassador not to use the death ray. The ambassador excused himself, called Red Square, and discovered that there was neither a death ray nor a plan to shoot down the satellite. He returned to Sting, telling him the Russians would indeed refrain from using the death ray on the satellite, but only if Sting agreed to sing “Money for Nothing” at the concert, which he did.

U2 was scheduled to play three songs in the late afternoon in London, and as was his custom, Bono began their set with a plaintive stillness that slowly elided into a grandstanding strut – half soldier, half strumpet – that took him to the edge of the crowd. As the rest of the band continued cycling through an instrumental riff, Bono – shirtless in suspenders – spotted a young woman being crushed by other fans into the barrier beneath the stage. He waved for the ushers to pass her over, he leapt from the stage into the makeshift orchestra pit and directed them in pulling her from the crowd. As soon as she was body-surfed backward over the barrier, she collapsed into Bono’s arms, and as the rest of the band continued the hopeful four-bar riff, Bono slow-danced with her in a way that seemed as much avuncular as romantic, before kissing her hand and rushing back to the stage to finish the song, ending with a medley of “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Amazing Grace.”

Offstage left was Gabriela Ngangi, who loved “Amazing Grace” and admired Bono’s dancing. Bono had been devastated to think that his Gabriela would not have the chance to see him perform, and so he’d had her driven from her orphanage near the shore of Lake Victoria up to Kampala, and from there, she flew to London. Despite the protests of the nuns who ran her orphanage, she stayed with Bono and the rest of the band at a Chelsea flat in the days prior to the show, where she grew adept at Centipede (see Computer Eighties) and won a large sum of money playing Uno with the bandmates. Gabriela enjoyed the show very much, despite the overwhelming crowd and the coffin-sized speakers that made her cover her ears against the noise. Of the other performers, she liked the moustached man in the sleeveless T-shirt and gold armband very much, as well as the thin man in the pale blue suit who dedicated his song to the children of the world and then sang about being a hero. Gabriela was exhausted by concert’s end, a cloud of white noise crackling in her head, but wanting to experience whatever she could, she went with Bono and the band to the after-party, where she drank orange juice and ate peanut M&Ms for the first time. At the end of the night, she fell asleep on Bono’s shoulder while he was carrying her to the taxi, just as she was about to ask if the energetic man with the moustache and armband had indeed ever found someone to love.

Begin with drums, scary drums, drums that make you understand why the Norsemen thought thunder was Thor’s hammer. The greatest works of art erupt from the gut, our animal part, the ancient seat of our worst fears and most heaving desires, and so for a song that seeks to emerge from these primeval urges, the appropriate overture is wood pounding on animal skins. The walloping heartbeat of a blue whale with arrhythmia. Doom from above, doom from below. Fear death by water.

To achieve this sound, you’ll need space, deep caverns of air and darkness. So set John Bonham and his drum kit at the bottom of a three-story stairwell at Headley Grange, an eighteenth century poorhouse straight from Merchant Ivory central casting. Then hang a pair of very high end German-made mikes from the ceiling to capture the tectonic reverberations.

Then come the guitars, as they must. With a syncopated lurch, Jimmy Page’s trio breaks in like Cerberus on the prowl – what the original Rolling Stone review described as “one honey of a chord progression” – but the three guitars are only undergirding for Robert Plant’s harmonica. Yowling and slutty, Plant’s mouth organ part was mixed using backward echo, with Page recording the echo of the original, then switching the two so that a ghost of sound precedes the played notes: this is why the song seems not just looped, but looped backwards. Like so many other elements of “When the Levee Breaks,” it demands to be heard through headphones.

The alchemical gold that is rock ‘n’ roll was begotten in a crucible that contained hillbilly bop, cowboy yodeling, scatty ragtime, and most of all, delta blues – all genres that ascribe to a special brand of low-rent old time religion in which women are fickle, money is scarce, nature is cruel, and God, if he exists, does not approve of you. As such, when you set out to create the world’s greatest rock song, pick a blues standard from the Depression, the lowest-rent epoch in American history, but not just any my-woman-left-me-so-I’m-sad-and-might-kill-her lament. What you’re about to do here is akin to the evil government doctors in the comic books who kidnap a normal enough human specimen then jack him up with chemicals, sturdy rust-resistant alloys, and other gizmos, so pick a song with a strong, pliable skeleton that you can then shove all of earth’s sadness and hell’s fury into. Like a tune written about one of the worst natural disasters in American history, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 (in which a quarter of a million refugees were displaced and the river south of Memphis swelled to sixty miles in width), but season it with enough ambiguity that it could be about anything: God’s indifference, the difficulties of urbanization, the yearning for oral sex, a girlfriend on the rag, the travails of infidelity, and all other imaginable manner of sexual frustration.

When a melancholy Plant begins warning that if it keeps on raining, the levee’s going to break, he sings like he was there pouring sand into burlap bags in 1927, all the soul of a shoeless blues man channeled into a set of pipes that almost single-handedly sired hard rock, heavy metal, prog rock, and a unlikely interest in the fiction of Tolkein among the punked out longhairs of the late 70s. All the while Bonham’s deep space drums continue to crash like waves into the levee wall and Page’s guitar hooks flash like unrelenting bolts of lightning. To fashion the greatest rock song ever, the typical verse-chorus-verse structure is insufficient, too benign and immobile in its cycles: what you need to achieve an effect that’s both bone-chilling and sexually electric is the lyrics’ narrative drive coupled with music that lassos chaos and stasis at the same time. Thus Plant hopes against hope that the levee will hold, while the instruments, like nature itself, drive on. Something’s got to give.

And it does. For a moment everything cuts out but Page’s guitar, which inches ever higher until rejoined by Bonham’s devastating drums. Then all hell breaks loose as Plant switches character from the plaintive Mississippi sharecropper to the pitiless, howling voice of the storm. “Don’t it make you feel bad / When you’re trying to find your way home / You don’t know which way to go,” he keens, a scornful destroyer from a pre-Christian pantheon, “If you’re going to down south / They got no work to do / If you don’t know aboutChicago.” Then, as though language could not contain the storm’s malevolence, Plant caterwauls for a few bars, but being Robert Plant, even his shrieking is on key. He’s the ideal frontman for the raging gale, the north country boy with Viking in his blood speaking for cold water and piercing winds as they lay waste to great swaths of earth in the deep heat of the American South.

Besides its virtuosity, what keeps your heavily vamped seven-minute song from growing tiresome is that each verse was mixed using a different set of studio effects. After the remorse and fear of the first few lines and the roaring, talon-sharp bloodlust of the second verse, Page dickers with his frontman’s voice yet again, modulating it into a cough syrup trip, so that when Plant warns that crying won’t help you and praying won’t do you no good, it sounds like he’s singing through a sheet of water from a hundred yards away. And because he is the original rock and roll sex demon, there must be a reference to thinking about his baby and moaning. Imagine Plant panthering atop the levee, eying the swelling water, torn apart by lust, undone by fear. After the levee breaks comes the story’s clincher: with his cropland ten feet under, our benighted sharecropper has no choice but to leave home for the chill of the Windy City.

But the boys from Britain aren’t done quite yet. The song’s last minute encapsulates all of its pain and rage and yearning with two small words, repeated over and over: “Going down,” while the instruments swirl toward a musical black hole. As Page once said in an interview, “At end you get this super-dense sound, in layers, that’s all built around the drum track. And you’ve got Robert, constant in the middle, and everything starts to spiral around him.” Or, as the original Rolling Stone reviewer wrote, “the group constructs an air of tunnel-long depth, full of stunning resolves and a majesty that sets up as a perfect climax.”

The greatest rock songs are all based around the eternal themes: “Imagine” (man and society); “Hotel California” (man and the afterlife); “Respect” (woman and man); “With or Without You” (man and God/a lover/Bono’s sunglasses manufacturer); “Stairway to Heaven” (man and ?). “When the Levee Breaks” takes up the tried and true Faulknerian trope of man and nature, with a few slices of juicy sex and oblique references to the divine thrown in for good measure. It is a song that understands that deeper than promises of love and wails of heartache lie the primordial drive toward life itself, the baseline yoking of sex and survival – go forth and fill the earth and subdue it, and all that – and that deeper still, at the bedrock of everything, is bedrock, a world that existed long before we were here and will exist long after we’re gone.

The No Coast Derby Girls skate at Pershing Auditorium in downtown Lincoln, fifteen hundred miles from the Pacific, eleven hundred from the Atlantic, and two blocks from the Nebraska State Capitol, a domed sandstone tower locals call “The Penis of the Plains” with a mixture of affection and scorn. The building dominates the landscape like something out of The Lord of the Rings, but in lieu of a lidless all-seeing eye there’s a red pulsing light that warns away low-flying planes. That light flashes between the legs of The Sower, a 19’ statue bestriding the Capitol’s dome, frozen in the act of scooping seed from his massive groin-level pouch. Inside, the walls gleam with mosaic murals portraying bull-necked Teutonic farmers harvesting golden fields, their sturdy wives and grim children pitching in. Manifest destiny is taken seriously around here. Everything is goldenrod and indigo, vermillion and emerald, and the figures in their fertile landscapes hang foreshortened and humorless above the viewer like Titans. The style might best be described as Übermensch Socialist Agrarian. In fact, one of Hitler’s intra-bunker memos detailed his plan to move the capital of the Nazi Empire to Lincoln after conquering the United States, and to rule the world from its Capitol, under the aegis of the virile Sower.

Once inside Pershing’s arena, the first thing you see is a wide burgundy velvet curtain hung from the rafters, which looks like an oversized version of something Vincent Price would have draped over his parlor windows. The plush seats are of identical color and fabric. The air is close, the smell musty: it’s the feeling of entering the biggest, emptiest attic in the world. On the other side of the curtain is the roller derby loop, about a quarter the size of an outdoor track, and behind it is deep wooden stage with three raised curtains – red, white, and blue.

From 7:20 to 7:45, two dozen women emerge from behind the velvet curtain. The youngest are college-aged, the oldest in their early 40s. It’s a Monday night in late August, a few weeks before the NCDG championship bout, warm enough for them to arrive in the miniskirts, tanktops, bike shorts, and leggings they practice in. Shambling across the track, they wear the expressions of those who’ve just left eight or ten hours of work for two hours of play that feels a lot like work, and at the stage they greet each other wearily with nods and smiles and monosyllables, then set themselves down to lash on skates, to strap down kneepads and elbow pads and helmets. With customized wrenches they expertly tighten or loosen their wheels, adjusting their skates’ pitch and yaw and roll. An ant approaching the stage would be met by a mountain range of bulky gym bags ringed with warm foothills of Chuck Taylors. For the sake of ankle support, the girls tie their skates tight, and blisters from the constant abrasion glisten with antibiotic ointment. Unlike athletes on ESPN, this isn’t their profession, and the difference is unmistakable in these echoey fanless moments of transition between the job world and the skate world.

With a show-and-tell combination of pride and bashfulness, Sylvia Bullet displays a new mouthguard her father gave her, which has a rare, useful feature: a central slot. She pops it in. “Now I can breathe through my mouth,” she says in her melodic, oboe’s voice, then demonstrates, sucking air in and shushing it out through the microchip-sized hole. “Except I feel like my teeth move when I put it in, like a retainer.” Not long out of college, Sylvia is tall and broad-shouldered and pale, with short curls the color of molten iron that twist and coil atop her head. Considering her appearance and her status as one of the league’s top jammers, it’s no surprise nearly everyone who’s been to the derby knows who she is.

At 7:45, the girls circle up for pre-practice stretching. Someone has brought a kindergarten-age daughter who scurries serpentine around them, occasionally pausing by one or another to ape their motions. The range of fitness varies, but some are limber as gymnasts, like Devilynn Wheels, who can stand lock-kneed in skates, bend at the waist, and press her fingers into the worn rubber. Her Gypsy features and complexion set her apart from her more typically Anglo teammates, as does her hair, which is complexly bobby-pinned into a sort of thatchy skullcap: months before she shaved her head and now her hair’s in that awkward in-between stage. As the skaters stretch hamstrings and glutes and lower backs – employing one aptly called the stripper stretch – some discuss preparations for the upcoming championship bout in mid-September. The little girl is now playing Duck, Duck, Goose with the circle. They are not playing with her. By 8:00, everyone is up and skating slow laps. Watching with me from the flotsam near the stage is newcomer Amy, who’s waiting for her gear to be shipped. She’s on the more wholesome end of the derby’s girl-next-door to death-metal-groupie spectrum, but her ears’ tragi flash with tiny silver hoops, just like many of her teammates’.

Half- and three-quarter speed is slow enough for limited chit-chat. The little girl is jogging laps too until someone barks at her to scram, at which she sulks back to the stage. Around the track, the pack speed is steadily increasing: if it were a movie, this scene’s soundtrack would be The Hall of the Mountain King. With mouthguards inserted, each face has a slightly bulldoggish cast to it. One of the recently arrived refs blows his whistle and shouts “A hundred percent,” at which the skaters accelerate to full-bore sprinting. No talking now, just the clack of wheels on track, the whir of their spinning, and the snorts of people pushed to the cardiovascular edge. Eying the zooming flock, Amy looks daunted. After two minutes the ref blows the whistle and everyone decelerates. Kelly Ripa-Nipalov, the vocal captain of the Mary K Mafia team, yells “Nobody sit down, everybody keep moving.” There’s a cool-down lap. Huffing and flushed, the girls grip their hips or lace fingers behind helmets like conquered soldiers. After the lap they skate over to the stage and their water bottles; some don’t slow down until the last possible moment, then whip their bodies around in a dashing veronica, converting linear momentum into torque and stopping on a dime. The water break is quick. Almost before they sit down they stand again, leaving Rorschach sweat marks behind. Soon they’re lined up and Kelly Ripa-Nipalov, towering over most of the other girls, is passing out mesh tank-tops for identification during the scrimmage: red, blue, red, blue. In order to call penalties during the jams, the refs write girls’ numbers in Magic Marker on their sweat-slick shoulders: 9mm, 42, $6.99, 36D, 187, 750ml.

The scrimmage is violent. A number of high-speed mash-ups bring down two or three girls. Punky tomboy Chazzie Skateweather abuses her opponents indiscriminately, wearing an executioner’s grin or an adolescent scowl as her bent arms pop up into opponents’ ribs. During one collision Shiv falls hard on a knee, crawls out of bounds, and gingerly removes a kneepad, revealing a large scab re-opened and bleeding. Pain contorts her usually placid face, twisting her mouth into a grimace; with her grunts and strained breathing she sounds like a woman in labor, like a prizefighter in the tenth round.

Even as she stares at Shiv, Amy says she’s not worried about injury: “My friends tell me I’m going to get hurt, but my biggest concern right now is picking the right skate name. I want something feminine but tough, sexy but not too cute.” Amy’s attitude toward her skate name is typical – they’re the crown jewels of the girls’ personae. Most names are puns, either feminizing the tough or toughening the feminine: Systa Wrecktomy, Miss Anthropy, Chantilly Mace, Sylvia Bullet, Champ Pain, Devilynn Wheels. And the names’ duality gets at the heart of the derby’s ethos. Call it “Feminine Machismo.” In a world in which many women are faced with an unfortunate set of either/or choices, the derby operates on the logic of both/and: sexual and smart, feminine and deeply, unapologetically violent.

In their bouts, the derby girls wear eye shadow, lipstick, and mascara, sport short skirts over fishnet or black hose strapped to garters, and when they clean an opponent’s clock, they don’t rush over to see if they’re okay. Derby means never having to say you’re sorry.

♀

Like the Tour de France, roller derby is a team sport with one champion aided by the efforts of teammates: each team has five skaters, four blockers and one jammer distinguished by a starred Lycra swimcap worn condom-like over her helmet. Blockers block. Jammers score as many points as they can in their two-minutes jams, the atomic unit of each period, with ten jams to a period and three periods to a bout. At the referee’s whistle, the jam begins and the blockers shuffle forward while jammers remain at their own starting line behind the other skaters. A few heartbeats later the second whistle blows, and the jammers are off, racing toward the blocker-pack.

This is where things get tricky. The blockers want their own jammer to break through the pack unhindered and still vertical, but they also want to beat the bejesus out of the other team’s jammer. The other squad’s blockers want to do the same. This is an impasse. It would be simpler and less interesting if blockers were given carte blanche – simpler because they’d punch and kick and throw to the ground everyone wearing the opposing color, less interesting because the resulting Apocalypse would leave every player flat and bleeding. As it is, making contact with elbows, forearms and hands is illegal, as are tripping, kicking, and pushing from behind. With these constraints, trying legally to clear paths for your jammer while not letting the other jammer through requires craftiness. It’s half brawl, half tango.

Skating through such a scrum is like navigating a slalom where the obstacles not only move but are eager to knock you down; it can be done but requires timing, grit, and a funambulist’s balance. After breaking through the pack for the first time, the jammers receive one point for each opposing blocker they lap, but every pass will be another gauntlet.

Previous derby incarnations have been less Tour de France and more WWE: old-school sports promoters and businessmen formed syndicates that fixed bouts and staged feuds, and skaters kowtowed to the vision of what league management thought would make good entertainment. The current all-female, grassroots revival of the sport in the past six years is radically different. Leagues are started by local women, portions of profits are given to charity, and the outcome depends only on strategy, stamina, strength, and skill. In the past few years, the number of teams in North America has grown from 50 to 150, most of which belong to the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association.

Like most other leagues in the WFTDA, the No Coast Derby Girls have multiple teams: Gang Green and the Mary K Mafia, who have won the last three bouts. Since the league is small the teams practice together. They’re foes five percent of the time and friends the other ninety-five. The next bout is the league championship: 9/15. Beware the Ides of September.

♀

Since the NCDG pay all costs out of pocket, filling seats is critical, and since it’s expensive to advertise via TV, radio, billboards, etc., they take it to the people, pamphleteering tailgates at Husker games, locally owned coffee shops, and, yes, the Nebraska State Fair, specifically the evening when rock legend Pat Benatar headlines.

At the fair dusk is a time of transition, as overwhelmed mothers and their squawking broods are replaced by stolid elderly folks and listless young lovers; moreover, by supper time, many fairgoers are stuffed with foot-long hotdogs, quarts of lemon shake-up, fried peaches on sticks, slabs of prime rib, and funnel cakes that weigh as much as family Bibles. Everything feels turgid, sleepy, entropy’s lukewarm aftermath.

Half an hour before show time, the bleachers sloping up from the stage are already overflowing, and after handing out fliers for the championship bout, some girls migrate to the side of the stage for a better view of Benatar. But no one onstage tuning and adjusting and mike-testing looks remotely like a well-preserved rock goddess. Instead the NCDG are met by the grungy sight of Brain Face, the opening act, a Norwegian metal band. The girls are disappointed even before the music begins. After it begins, they are very, very disappointed. They exit for the beer garden, and after a Bud Light, move out to work the crowd. Shiv and Sylvia Bullet operate in tandem, and while they’re both star jammers for Mary K Mafia, both lean bright-eyed hipsters with short edgy hair cuts, their pamphleteering could not be more different:

Sylvia is a roller derby proselytizer, politely saying “Excuse me” to passersby, comporting herself primly, giving the impression of a door-to-door evangelist who’s just been smoothing out her skirt’s wrinkles on the porch. After introducing herself, she earnestly describes the derby, then invites them to the bout, handing over a flier as though it were a Chick Tract. Shiv on the other hand is a Hare Krishna, effervescent and beaming, skipping over the hard-packed dirt, her long arms swinging freely, half-singing her invitations, slipping fliers into fairgoers’ hands without warning, telling them only “Come to the derby!” before gamboling away to the next unsuspecting Benatar fan. They do target alternative kids – the ones with dreadlocks, limb-consuming tattoos, jeans either very baggy or very tight, gauged earlobes, tie-dyed shirts, nose-bridge piercings, black fingernails, belt-loop chains of Marleyesque length and weight – but they offer fliers to everyone, smiling at the grandfathers with suspenders hoisting Wranglers to mid-belly, greeting the matrons in their muumuus, waving at the farm boys from out west who’ve come to the city with their prize-winning steers and are eagerly anticipating the rock show. Their kindness to the aged and unhip isn’t surprising: while the girls occasionally complain about being stuck in the heart of the Heartland, they also hate the coastal stereotype of their state as backward and unsophisticated. Remember, their name is the No Coast Derby Girls.

Shiv is really getting into it, skipping ahead of Sylvia, barely tossing off a flier before moving onto the next person, giving peppy hoots and shouts like an indie cheerleader who’s downed too many fair-trade espressos. This is dimmed a bit when a half-drunk older man pulls her in for a hug then says, “I betcha weren’t planning on getting up close to old farts like me so we could cop a feel.” She gives a disgusted Lucille Ball expression, and without missing a beat says, “You’re right,” and extricates herself.

Soon after a leathery middle-aged woman darts over to Sylvia and Shiv with her arm locked around a young teenaged girl. From the woman’s roving eyes, jittery appendages, severe skinniness, and poor oral health, it’s quite possible she’s on meth. While the girl stares at her shoelaces, the woman beams and in a chipper Kalashnikov monologue she introduces herself and her daughter, tells the skaters how great she thinks they are, then says, “My daughter’s a wrestler,” squeezing the girl’s shoulder in a way that’s more appraising than affectionate. “She wrestles boys. She used to wrestle boys in school, knock ‘em into their lockers,” she adds, cackling. “We figured we should get her to wrestle without getting into all that trouble. So can she join the derby?” The daughter has remained impressively calm during all of this. Shiv’s eyes are golf balls. Sylvia manages to show interest in the woman’s anecdotes while expressing a silent, maternal concern for the child, and now, still poker-faced, she asks, “How old is she?”

“Fourteen,” says the woman.

“Well, legally, no one can join the derby until they’re eighteen,” says Sylvia, friendly but no-nonsense. “But you should come back in four years.”

“Okay,” says the woman, still talking through a grin, “we’ll do that.”

“Yeah, we’ll be waiting for you,” says Shiv, trying to make eye contact with the daughter.

More beers are bought. Behind the semi trucks and pavilions the gauzy western sky is the color of scrambled eggs. The heat has abated and, praise Odin, Brain Face has as well. The crowd on the edge of the bleachers is now five deep. From our vantage near the Budweiser stands, it’s impossible to see the stage.

Finally, to a roar from the NCDG and the rest of the 2000+ crowd, half of whom weren’t even alive during her halcyon era, Pat Benatar takes the stage. The woman with the wrestler daughter is sitting on a man’s shoulders behind the crowd, punching the sky with both fists at the same time. Onstage, Benatar’s in stovepipe pants, boots, trench coat, and gloves – all tight, all black. Someone has apparently yet to tell her it’s no longer fashionable to dress like Michael Jackson circa 1994. But the crowd doesn’t care. They sing or hum along to all the songs, even the obscure ones. They shout her name during lulls. They seem implicitly to forgive her for trying to stave off a middle-age that has already passed. They go Pentecostal when they hear the catchy guitar hook for “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” wax romantic a few songs later to “Shadows of The Night,” and in the thick close air that smells of sweat and meat and beer, it’s hard not to hum along.

♀

Visually, Feminine Machismo might most vividly be expressed by Mary K Mafia’s logo. The background is pink, the words and images black. At the center is a large lipstick imprint, the full lips shaped like a Cupid’s bow. Behind the kiss is an intersection of two open switchblades, flanking it are a pair of Berettas, and above are big black stars. Circumscribing the tableau are the words “Mary K Mafia,” the letters leggy and bell-bottomed and bookended by broken hearts. Feminine Machismo.

The trouble with the feminine side of feminine machismo is that many guys see fishnet and miniskirts as eye candy, which leads to the question of whether the derby’s growing popularity is the result of pandering to a male-dominated audience. What kind of sexy is the good kind of sexy? The root of this question is half a century old, for although the derby and alternative culture more generally take some of their cues from the 80s, the genesis of its aesthetic and attitude are the Eisenhower years. Beside the derby stand other current espousals of that decade’s women’s culture, in particular the recent stitching/knitting revival and the neo-pin-up Suicide Girls, whose website includes the statement, “Fed up with a tired and predictable definition of beauty, we Suicide Girls are dedicated to celebrating amazing, sexy women who fail to fit society’s mold.” But while it’s true that the Suicide Girls don’t look like typical starlets/models/centerfolds, the main difference is that they’re heavily inked, paler, and more likely to have labial rings. However much alt there is in the alt-porn, it’s still porn, and in order to make money, the website needs men who find the models sexually attractive, just like any other skin mag. Despite its packaging, SuicideGirls is Maxim with Sailor Jerry tattoos. On the other end of the spectrum are the bookish hipster chicks who’ve helped resuscitate stitching and knitting from the status of a dying hobby practiced only by Midwestern grandmothers and girls in 4-H. But as charming as the phenomenon is, it’s a pretty tame domestic activity that recalls more than anything a time in our country’s history when women’s place was considered to be the home, where a woman could undertake innocuous, useful pastimes.

The comparison might explain why roller derby and not the others are the darlings of indie culture. The girls don’t shy away from sexuality; to quote Amy: “We enjoy the attention, dammit. I think that’s empowerment as well. The men want you, desire you, but they can’t have you. And that feels good.” At the same time, sexuality isn’t the point: the point is a sport that requires strength and speed and endurance, a sport that takes a fierce delight in violence. Given needles, the girls wouldn’t knit a cardigan – they’d stab someone. Understandably, many NCDG grow peeved when asked if they’re just Suicide Girl-type eye candy, saying things like: “They always compare us to strippers: if you think stripping is degrading, roller derby must be degrading.”

“But it’s utilitarian. If we wore long pants, it wouldn’t work.”

“Like our point is to get guys off.”

“That might get them in the door, but every guy I’ve talked to after the bout is like, ‘Wow, that was really hard.’”

“A lot of guys compare it to football.”

“They’re not here to see scantily clad women – that would wear off soon.”

But even if they are there to see scantily clad women, maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe – just like any other sport – all that matters is who wins.

♀

Snuggled into an Eddie Bauer neighborhood a few miles southeast of Pershing is the National Museum of Roller Skating, a converted home of neat red brick half devoured by ivy. Three quarters of the facility is used as office space, carpeted in low-pile corporate heather, its partitions glowing with bright skate dancing posters from the 80s. Past the grey maze of cubicles, past the life-sized bronze statue of two pigtailed girls with skates tied together and slung over their shoulders, past the Hall of Fame, which really is in a hallway, you’ll find the museum tucked away in the building’s far corner. “The Evolution of the Wheel: 1860-1998” traces skate wheel technology through 57 stages of development, while “Roller Skating Fun!” contains a curio’s worth of figurines, including skating nuns, Barbies, and Precious Moments angels. On the walls are half a dozen WWII-era paintings of skate dancing couples in their Sunday best, narcotized smiles hanging beneath peachy cheeks. The boys are the lettermen Fonzie stared down on Happy Days, and the girls will someday become the women on the refrigerator magnets with the snarky cut-out thought blurbs like: “I think I got away with it” and “Do I sense a bitch-fest starting to simmer here?” It’s like Norman Rockwell without the soul.

Roller basketball and roller soccer are mentioned, and multiple displays are given over to men’s skate dancing costumes, which have developed in the last half century from lounge lizard to disco king to Brian Boitano. However, there’s no mention of the current derby revival, perhaps because the roller girls next door don’t look much like girls next door. The museum gives the institutional thumbs-up to boys in blazers and girls in poodle skirts, and even men lacquered in sequins and spandex. But women with biceps, and tattoos on those biceps? Apparently Rosie the Riveter and her daughters need not apply.

♀

It’s Thursday night, post-practice, and half a dozen of the NCDG are at Duffy’s Tavern two blocks from Pershing, sitting outside at a couple of green picnic tables. Miller High Life is the drink of choice. Along the walls are a number of posters advertising the upcoming championship bout, styled after 50s B-film promos – melting zombies about to paw shrieking girl Fridays.

In a way that’s genuinely considerate and non-perfunctory, Sylvia jumpstarts the conversation by asking Shorty how her week has been going. Shorty replies that her knee hurts but that the muscle relaxants she’s been taking have helped. “That, and a little sump’n sump’n,” she adds in her flat Nebraska twang, her hand wrapped around an invisible phallus, pumping up and down. Shiv’s fawnish eyes widen in embarrassment, while Shorty segues to her job at a gourmet popcorn store. “Scoop, bag, and toss. Eight hours a day. Sometimes,” she adds sarcastically, “you get to scoop, bag, and seal. This one old lady has the best job. I’m waiting for her to kick. She molds the chocolate.”

The September air is balmy and pleasant, but the real reason they’re outside is nicotine – most of the girls smoke at least occasionally, and most are doing it tonight. Shiv, who’s not, mentions a friend who has a conniption whenever anyone lights up around her, then she does an impression, squinting her eyes as though she’s been Maced, waving the smoke away from her face in a way that’s both frantic and prissy, squeaking out little coughs, pulling the collar of her shirt over her nose then making irritated grumbling noises. By the end of the mime, everyone at the table’s close to tears. Soon after Devilynn sidles up, drink in hand, and playfully bumps Shiv down the bench as she scoots in. Upon seeing a bout, a friend who’s an author said she was inspired to write a children’s book about the derby using animals for characters, and watching Devilynn prance in and take dainty sips from her straw – all half-dollar eyes and sinewy limbs – it’s easy to see why she was slated to be a giraffe.

When “Don’t Stop Believing” comes on over the P.A., Devilynn hooks her arm around Champ Pain’s neck and they raise their drinks and sing along, rocking out with eyes squeezed shut, wearing mock grimaces of bittersweet longing.

With the High Life and smoke flowing fast, the conversation soon becomes free-wheeling and nonlinear, often with multiple people speaking at the same time.

“Whenever I think of moving, I always ask, ‘Do they have a derby team?’”

“Now when I’m not exercising for more than a day or two, I get the jitterbugs.”

“Women hold grudges. We’re psycho … don’t get me wrong. Men are fucked up too with their Peter Pan Syndromes.”

“We have the tendency to be passive-aggressive.”

“Just a little bit,” adds Devilynn.

Then Champ Pain breaks in, her labret stud clinking on the rim of her glass: “But it’s like a female utopia. I just love the bitches.”

The banter goes on a while before the mood slowly settles, the effervescence of The Champagne of Beers giving way to its drowsiness. They begin to talk about their jobs. For a while after college, Sylvia worked at a group home, and for the year she was student teaching, Shiv taught classes of at-risk kids. Their stories are sobering, their attitudes progressive and deeply empathetic. Unsmiling now, Shiv says to the quiet table, “There was another teacher who had lots of wild kids too and sometimes he couldn’t handle it, and see, there was this closet in the back of the class and if a kid was being just too out of control, he’d lock the kid up in this little dark closet for like fifteen minutes until he calmed down. It happened all the time.”

Hearing this, Sylvia’s jaw clenches, and at the story’s conclusion she slams her palm into the picnic table. This is the only time I ever hear her raise her voice: “Dammit, if we’re going to save these kids, how is that going to happen if we lock up the ones who need the most help?” She’s scowling, her face burning pink, as though the kid in the story were her own brother. It’s obvious she has a real desire to help those who need it most, and it makes you hope she doesn’t spend the rest of her life in front of a computer screen.

The derby catches most of its participants at what psychiatrists might call liminal periods in their lives. Some work clerical jobs, like data entry for the state, a few are in grad school, a couple work mid-level office jobs, others are baristas at local coffee shops. Some were education majors in college, but not all of them currently teach. Half a dozen or more waitress part- or full-time. Most are not in jobs they would consider long-term. Most are single, most childless. Many are close to their parents, but most have chosen different paths than their mothers’. Although most are Nebraska natives, few want to stay in the state for the rest of their lives, but none have definite plans for moving. Many are dating more or less seriously, but even the steadier relationships seem quite a ways from the marriage track. Neither raising families nor racing up the corporate ladder, they seem unsure of exactly where their lives are going. “What the hell am I doing at the Coffeehouse?” is the way Shiv put it. On a different occasion Sylvia said of her job at a deli, “I’ve asked myself, over and over again, what am I doing here? I’m in a transitory period. Something’s got to happen.” She’s considering applying for a data entry job herself and wryly worries her life is starting to look like the part in Plath’s Bell Jar where the protagonist’s mother tells her she needs to learn shorthand in order to get work.

As we hear so frequently we’re dulled to its reality, the freedom and comfort of life in early 21st century America are unprecedented, and I doubt any of the girls would swap lives with a pioneer wife and her pre-dawn milking, greasy diet, and numerous risky pregnancies. But the concern over a lack of direction that Sylvia and Shiv and others expressed is par for younger Americans. Whatever’s been gained in Skype and Thai cuisine and IRAs, some amount of rootedness and purpose and community has been lost. For single women in particular, the years between teenage companionship and long-term stability in jobs and/or marriages can be bereft of female friends. What high school girls look forward to and married women reminisce about is more often than not a lonely decade.

Part of the derby’s popularity is that it can help restore some rootedness and purpose and community. As Amy said at one point: “I’ve been able to reconnect with women again. Even in college I only had a few female friends, but never a group of women. I think girls need that camaraderie at this stage in their lives.”

At the same time, the derby isn’t a cure-all. The biggest difference between watching the NCDG gearing up for practice and watching a high school girls’ basketball team do the same is that the teenagers think about life in the future tense, but the derby girls – five, ten, twenty years later – have seen some of that future fade into present and then past without necessarily knowing any more about the destination than when they were still too young to buy a legal pack of American Spirits. And it’s hard not to think about that without at least the teeniest bit of sadness.

♀

Pain is one of the derby’s few constants. Old injuries nag and new ones constantly threaten. On the NCDG MySpace page, each of the girls’ profiles includes a “Favorite Injury.”

At a practice in early September, Shorty, who skates like a mastiff sprints, buckles in the pack and skids hard across the rubber. Her favorite injury is separating her knees: “6x left, 5x right.” Stoically she limp-skates off the track, one leg stiff as an axle, and at a water break, Kelly Ripa-Nipalov, easily the tallest girl on either squad, skates over as she’s trying to limber the leg up. Keep in mind Shorty’s moniker isn’t ironic, like Samoan nose tackles named “Tiny” – she really is short, maybe 5’0 on tiptoes.

“How’s the knee, Shorty?” Kelly queries down to her.

“It won’t bend.”

“It won’t bend?”

“It won’t bend.”

Later in the scrimmage, amid heavy congestion along one of the straightways, Botox Betty trips and goes down too fast to cushion her fall. The rest of the pack zooms around her, but Betty doesn’t get up. She doesn’t even try. The refs call an injury time-out and skate over to her while everyone else mills inside the ellipse. The injury barely seems to register to Shiv, who yawns, noticing the good attendance that evening: “It’s nice there are more people at practice. I feel like I can relax …” She folds her hands behind her neck and lies back as though stargazing, revealing the first few rungs of a tattooed ladder running up her right side. Her face has a comic actress’ plasticity, but now it’s absolutely still. “Hey guys,” she adds, rolling her head from side to side as though noticing everyone else for the first time. Just as men are more eager to follow other men if they’re tall and athletic, women pay more attention to other women if they’re beautiful, and if they date actors and artists and musicians. Shiv is, and does, and many teammates have circled around her, waiting to see what she’ll do next. She doesn’t need to feminize the toughness in her name because her femininity isn’t in question. As Betty breathes raggedly like a hurt toddler before it begins to sob, the refs whispering to her in soothing tones, Shiv now and again sings various cheers. Someone mentions a high-powered team whose girls skate underneath each other’s legs. Ever the organizer, and 6’1 to boot, Kelly is soon standing motionless on the track, her legs a circumflex. With her Amazonian size, deep-socketed blue eyes, and inky mane of hair, her wide-legged stance makes her look like a comic book character. After a couple of miscues, lithe Systa Wrecktomy sails under without any problem. Cheering from the team. One of the refs has left to call Betty’s family. There’s a challenge put forth for Systa to skate under two girls. Someone volunteers Devilynn, and she skates out ten feet in front of Kelly. On her first try, Systa navigates through the two sets of legs successfully. Even more cheering. Just about everyone has their helmet off at this point, and Shiv looks over to someone and says, “Your hair’s getting long. I like it.” Sauntering over to Shiv, Kelly hikes up her skirt to show off a grapefruit-sized bruise high on her hip, a jaundiced brown spangled with violet.

At this, Shiv’s large eyes open dreamily, her lips part, her head tilting to one side as though involuntarily. Half the team is watching. She waits for a beat. “You’re in love,” she jokes, deadpan, looking up at Kelly. “You’re finally in love …”

A few minutes later Betty’s father arrives and with the refs helps Betty up so he can take her to the E.R. Flushed red and weeping openly, Betty shuffles away, one arm pressed tight to her side. As she exits, her teammates turn toward her and give her a round of applause. Later I’ll learn out she’s fractured two sets of cartilage between her ribs.

It’s important to realize the other girls weren’t being callous but rather hypersensitive – Shiv wasn’t bantering goofily because she wasn’t aware what was happening, but because she was. Her gallows humor was a savvy response to a fallen teammate moaning nearby. Everyone there knew the dangers of the derby – down-turned lips and cooing weren’t going to help anyone. All that would have done is made them a bit more afraid the next time, and in the derby you can only be as good as you are fearless. Today’s mother might give her child a kiss and Band-Aid on the knee, but Shiv was living a fiercer and more ancient maternity: Come back with your shield or on it. Every time there was a lull, filled by the sight and sound of Betty’s pain, you could see in Shiv’s eyes that she was screwing something a little tighter within herself before she came up with her next silly distracting comment. On a smaller scale, it’s like the story of an infantryman inIraqabout to storm an insurgent stronghold who turns to the guy behind him and asks if his fatigues make his butt look big.

♀

The championship bout is on a Friday, and at the last practice on Wednesday night the atmosphere is light, almost giddy. During stretching there’s a conversation about the “blatant nudity” clause in the NCDG’s newly drafted rules of conduct, during which Champ Pain asks: “Would this make my Janet Jackson from two matches ago illegal?” Other people jokingly complain about not being able to flash the crowd anymore. Someone asks if this means she’ll have to start wearing underwear. Then Shorty pipes up and tells everyone she’s hosting the after-party. “But it’s going to be a VIP party,” she says a little angrily, “derby girls and friends of the derby only. If there’s anyone I don’t approve of, I’m gonna kick ‘em out. There’s that one girl who started handing out prescription drugs the last time at my place, which I don’t have a problem with, but then she was flashing her titties at my boyfriend and offering him sex and taking off her clothes. If she shows up again, I’m kicking her out.”

As they walk toward Pershing’s bike rack after practice, Sylvia and Shiv are bantering about the future. The two have been friends for a while, and they possess a certain odd couple’s rapport, Shiv’s goofy improvisational humor bouncing off Sylvia’s polite earnestness. After the championship bout, they’ll both play on the NCDG travel team, composed of top players from both squads. And they don’t have a name yet.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research on the suffragette movement,” says Sylvia, her red curls darkened by sweat and stuck to her forehead. She mentions a group called the Iron Jawed Angels, early 20th century radicals who were imprisoned and then went on hunger strikes so long their jailors had to force feed them through tubes. “Isn’t that amazing?” asks Sylvia. “I think that would be a great name for the team.”

“I dunno,” says Shiv, her head bobbing from side-to-side. “That’s cool and all, but what about ‘Mad Maxines’? I think that’s still my favorite.”

“But ‘Iron Jawed Angels’ has so much history behind it,” says Sylvia, unlocking her bike. “I think it would be really inspiring to us.”

Shrugging grandly, Shiv says, “I just really like Mel Gibson movies.” She won’t be at the championship bout because she and her L.A. actor boyfriend bought tickets to Austin City Limits before the schedule was set, so she tells Sylvia, “You’re going to need to call me like all the time during the bout so I can get updates.”

“You’ll be at a rock concert and I’ll be in the middle of a giant arena that gets zero reception.”

“Well,” says Shiv, pondering this, “you can step outside when you’re not jamming, and I can just tell Van Morrison to quiet down for a second while I get the score.” They share a smile, then bid each other goodnight, and Sylvia begins leading her bike to the road, her curls sweat-darkened to the color of cherry cough syrup. When I ask her how she’s feeling about the bout, she says, “I’m nervous,” which is surprising, since on the track she always looks grim and unbreakable. “It’s nerve-wracking knowing you’ve got to go out there and physically perform in front of so many people. You want to be consistent. You build expectations and you want to go out and meet them.”

♀

The event staff at the championship bout on Friday night wear red windbreakers, white button-downs, and conservative ties. The average age is around 55. The men are pale, clean shaven, and whatever hair they have is neatly side-parted. The women look like what Pat Benatar is trying not to become. They are without exception polite and helpful and non-judgmental toward the cadre of derby carnies about to swarm through the doors.

Broadcasting outside Pershing is local rock station The Blaze, and a DJ named John who’s trim, bald, gregarious, and himself a big-time fan. Although he’s intelligent and well-spoken, his radio persona is The Animal, and whenever he’s on air, he affects the voice of such DJs everywhere, a rapid-fire baritone gravelly with testosterone. As he does so, we’ll occasionally make eye-contact, his expression somewhere between apologetic and self-deprecating. The angle he works is that Gang Green has lost the last three bouts and must revenge themselves tonight. His mantra: “Gang Green’s lookin’ for the Dubya. Gotta get the Dubya … yeaaaahhhhhh!”

Above the hubbub, coating Pershing’s west wall, is a giant mural, a tableau of doughy figures boxing, dancing, and bull-riding – the brawl, the tango, and a bit of Western madness thrown in for good measure. All about the air is turbulent, steely clouds above buffeted back and forth across a hot sun, the sky pregnant with rain. Inside Amy and other new girls hawk NCDG buttons, T-shirts, and pink panties screen-printed with the Mary K Mafia logo. After considering “Maggie Mean” as her skate name in honor of anthropologist Margaret Mead, Amy’s finally decided on the cute – but not too cute – Glitter Dunn.

Outside a young man, his face carbuncled with hoops and bars, dawdles with his daughter, a tiny five-year-old in a pink Mary K Mafia T-shirt and long brown pigtails. Standing opposite is an older couple, the man sporting a blonde Van Dyke, a black-and-pink checked fedora, and a sleeveless pink T-shirt. He says: “I wanted to paint my beard pink, but it was too fucking windy.”

Standing behind his daughter, the young man says “I’m gonna give you a beard,” then pulls her pigtails to the front of her face and ties them in a loose square knot around her chin. She giggles, but keeps her attention focused on the pink pom-pom she’s holding.

“It’s a weapon,” she says, stabbing an invisible adversary.

The Animal’s one extended tête-à-tête is with Gang Green jammer Chazzie Skateweather, who’s the youngest NCDG and has earned a reputation as one of the league’s bad girls. Tonight she’s wearing a 4” upswept faux hawk and a snarl. Replying to a question from The Animal, she says, “I’m not getting kicked out of this game.”

“You think someone with a name like Chazzie Skateweather wouldn’t get kicked out of so many games,” he replies.

Chazzie replies with an expression scrunched with disdain. “Do you even know who Charlie Starkweather was?”

In the arena, a number of the girls are skating laps in uniform. The girls have taped Christmas lights to the inner and outer boundaries to better mark the track, a sickly green synthetic rubber that’s slightly springy and always looks dirty – and probably always is. Everyone’s wearing some make-up, from the light to the garish. Team-color-appropriate eyeshadow is particularly popular. Garters and fishnet hose are common. Mary K Mafia’s uniforms turn out to be these pink collared short dresses that look like they were stolen from a diner waitress’s closet during the Eisenhower administration. The overall atmosphere is playful and relaxed – girls skate under each other’s legs, chat and joke and generally ignore any inter-team divisions. During a warm-up lap, one girl skates behind another while giving her a shoulder massage. As part of a Gang Green effort to win more fans, Devilynn is standing just inside the first set of doors, handing out lime-green glowsticks to spectators as they enter. She’s vamping it tonight in thick vermilion lipstick, her large hazel eyes coronaed with liner and kohl, looking like a heroine out of a Chaplin film, or at least as much as one can look flapperish in roller skates, 6” cut-off black denim shorts, and an upper-arm tattoo of a woman morphing into a skeleton. She comes from a family of ten and when a chunk of them arrive, she gleams and greets each with an excited hug.

Also here are the jittery woman from the fair, her husband, and her wrestler daughter. The woman now appears mellow to the point of boredom, while her daughter is deeply engaged in the goings-on about track and seems quite happy. If this were a black parody of a moralistic after-school special, the wrestler girl’s parents would die quick, painless deaths during the bout and the girl would be adopted by the NCDG, gaining the speed, strength, and skill necessary for derby glory long before she’d be legally capable of participating, then on her 18th birthday would emerge into adulthood ready to lead the No Coast Derby Girls to national triumph …

♀

Later, as the Gang Green mascot Sam is skating around in his gorilla suit with chartreuse bikini-top and tennis skirt, he stops to greet a man wearing a shirt that reads, “Kong Is in My Pants.” They talk.

♀

Many spectators are the sorts of folks Sylvia and Shiv targeted at the fair, including a contingent from Iron Brush Tattoo, one of the bout’s corporate sponsors, who are themselves a walking advertisement. When two women who look like Methodists emerge from one of the tunnels into the arena and scan the scene, one of them actually says, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The other says: “I like those fishnet stockings. Those are nice.”

Like The Blaze’s playlist, the music inside the arena is Least Common Denominator 80s Rock: Guns ‘N’ Roses, the Scorpions, Cinderella, and of course, Pat Benatar.

The derby has two announcers, one in his 20s, the other in his 40s. The older announcer does the play-by-play and much of the color commentary. The younger announcer’s primary task is to interject sexist remarks every few minutes. Sporting dark pants and a navy blazer over a thin sweater, the older announcer has the bland good looks and deep tan of a golf instructor; before the match, he turns to the younger announcer, gestures toward his get-up, and says, “My kid said I look stupid.” The younger announcer assures him he does not. The younger announcer is lying.

After they introduce the players, to much hooting and hollering, the bout begins.

And it’s brutal. Multiple notches of violence higher than any practice. Each team’s strategy seems to be to cripple the other team’s jammer, legally or no. Devilynn and Sylvia in particular don’t make it through their first few jams without being knocked skates over helmet. Once, after Sylvia breaks cleanly through the pack, a teammate tries to give her a whip around a corner, but Chazzie intercepts when she’s at her most vulnerable, knocking her into the trackside seats. After extricating herself from fans who are energized rather than annoyed, Sylvia locks her jaw, her eyes frosting over. The older announcer, hereafter Pro Shop Steve, says: “This match is brought to you by Iron Brush Tattoo: Tattoos so good they make you want to tell the truth.”

Now, down 22-13, Gang Green has Shorty jamming. After maneuvering through the pack she sails down the straightway and is turning the first corner when Kelly Ripa-Nipalov accelerates hard on the inside and blindsides her. The hit’s legal, but it’s an absolute clock-cleaning, sending Shorty sailing. When she lands, she lands on her head. She doesn’t move. Quickly, one of the refs blows his whistle for an injury time-out. Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” is echoing off the rafters. No one is humming along. The refs are kneeling over Shorty, careful not to move her or touch her head. Behind me someone shouts, “Where the hell’s the penalty?” Huddled in clumps, the girls shake their heads. One of the refs leaves and soon returns with a large First Aid bag. The announcers start throwing T-shirts into the parts of the crowd that make the most noise. “Keep your clothes on, please,” says Pro Shop Steve. He’s not kidding. Some of Shorty’s family and friends are now hunched over her. Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” begins thumping over the PA. Not quite soon enough, one of the announcers realizes how inappropriate this is and quickly tracks forward to the next song. Behind me, another fan is saying into his cell phone: “It’s a definite elbow right to the face, and they did nothing. These refs are something.” Paramedics arrive and delicately secure Shorty’s head in a brace before lifting her onto a gurney and trundling her out. Since they can’t do anything else, the skaters and crowd clap as she exits.

At the beginning of the next jam, with Mary K Mafia leading 41-35, Devilynn’s jamming for Gang Green. As always, she skates with an effortless elegance, a piscine economy of movement, and her intuition for spotting and sliding through holes is second to none. There’s a magnetic brio to her personality on the track, the self-conscious derring-do of someone who knows she’s fun to watch, a theatricality that’s earned by the number of points she scores. She doesn’t swagger when she walks, but she does when she skates. This jam, despite a number of hard checks by MKM’s blockers, she stays on her feet. The emotional atmosphere is that of a circus after an acrobat falls off the high wire. Blockers from both teams crash and fall, but she swerves around them into the open, and even MKM fans cheer. Along the straightway, she grandly flourishes her arms like some Renaissance herald. She breaks through the pack cleanly on her second pass, and then again on her third, weaving her way through as though everyone else were standing still. By the time the jam is ended, she’s given GG their first lead, 48-46.

“Are you ready for some girl-on-girl action?” the younger announcer asks the crowd.

Sylvia’s jamming next, maneuvering through the pack in her plucky hard-nosed way, but just as she’s accelerating around a turn, she slips and falls face-first. The crowd gasps and groans – no one wants to see the nice young men in white again – but after a few seconds she stands and skates inside the track, tugs the jammer’s cap off and sits down wearily. The first period ends soon after. During the intermission, as the bruised skaters exit to their respective locker rooms, half the crowd loiters near the track, listening to the intermission band onstage and drinking $5 Buds, while the rest mingle outside smoking.

Period Two is dominated by penalties. With Shorty’s ER trip, a number of lesser injuries, and some fans’ constant raging, the refs begin to crack down and Gang Green bears the brunt of it. After four minor fouls a player is sent to the penalty box, and rarely during Period Two does GG have all its skaters in at the same time. Midway through the period, with Champ Pain jamming for GG, a hard check hurtles her down the track as though she were on a Slip ‘N’ Slide. Her skirt and tutu fly up, revealing a green lace thong beneath. The guy next to me says, “Oh yeah.” At one point, GG’s shorthanded by three, with only two skaters to the Mafia’s five. And MKM capitalizes, taking a 91-72 lead by the intermission.

The beginning of the third period is like the second – lots of whistles, Gang Green frequently playing short, enough sprawling knock-downs to kill nearly all the Christmas lights in the outside string. In the chaos of rock music, announcer chatter, fan shouting, and multiple refs blowing their whistles and pointing ambiguously, it’s hard to tell what fouls are called on whom, and even harder what jammers are made ineligible by stepping out of bounds: you can’t predict how many points the scorers will allot each team, and frequently during the third period, it does seem like Gang Green gets low-balled. Certainly the virulent GG section behind me thinks so; when the refs call a time-out to re-tape the outside string of lights to the track, one of the GG rowdies says, “He fixes them lights like he fixes the game.”

Devilynn scores nine in the next jam, cutting the MKM lead to 109-96. Then Champ Pain, looking like she’s about to asphyxiate, brings Gang Green into triple digits, 109-100. As “Wild Thing” follows “Bad to the Bone,” the younger announcer says, “There’s a lot of bumping and slapping over there.”

Before Champ Pain’s next jam a few minutes later, Chazzie skates over to her and bangs with both fists on her helmet, shouting wordlessly into her face, and Champ Pain, who’s having the bout of her career, scores five. 116-105.

There’s less than a minute left. Devilynn’s jamming for GG, and although this is the fifth or sixth time this period alone, she bursts off the line at the whistle, sprinting as fast as she did her first jam. She swoops through the pack untouched, barely slowing, then races around the corner to catch up with them again. The crowd is louder than it’s been all night. Twenty-five seconds left. This time, the MKM blockers are waiting. They shoulder charge her, sometimes from both sides at the same time. Improbably, she manages to stay on her feet, but ahead of her a MKM blocker checks a GG blocker directly into her path. With no space or time to dodge, Devilynn does the only thing she can do: she jumps. After sailing over her own fallen blocker, to even more raucous cheering from the crowd, she lands still upright. But now she’s at the inside turn, still full speed, and remaining inbounds seems physically impossible – the centrifugal force is just too great. But nearing the outside boundary, she squats low, leans in, tucks her right leg behind her left knee and rides on one skate around the outer curve of the track before slowing enough to stand and sprint down the straightway. She is the Anna Pavlova of the roller derby.

But the seconds are slipping away – ten, nine, eight – and as Devilynn’s nearing the pack one last time, the ref blows the final whistle. She collapses onto the track, exhausted, knowing it wasn’t quite enough. And she’s right. The final score is 116-111, Mary K Mafia.

Post-bout, it’s a hug-fest. Fans of both sexes wait with adolescent shyness to chat with the smiling sweat-wet skaters, and never is the reason for the derby’s popularity clearer: for sports fans used to watching doll-sized digitalized reproductions of their favorite players half-ass it until the playoffs then bitch out Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters at post-game press conferences, the chance to press flesh with the stars and then have them ask you how you’re doing is to take a rolling dust bath in fame’s pixie powder.

Midway through the third period began an unmistakable and increasingly violent drum roll on Pershing’s roof, and just after the match ends, Pro Shop Steve announces, “We are in a Tornado Warning,” which leads to massive cheering from the crowd, including a sustained chant of “FreeBeer, FreeBeer …”

And outside, under the mural of boxers and dancers, delighted kids in pink and in green dance under the warm rain.

♀

O’Rourke’s downtown is the opposite of the frat bars which surround it. The crowd is old, blue-collar, and curmudgeonly. Its two pool tables boast some of the finest games in Lincoln. No designer polos, no pretty girls, no University of Nebraska apparel. It’s an Old Style kind of place. With a reputation of having the last last call in Lincoln, it usually gets crowded around 12:30 and not before.

Tonight is different. Near the end of the bout, Pro Shop Steve announced O’Rourke’s was hosting the derby party, and by 9:30, with the first few of the NCDG beginning to trickle in, the place is as crowded as a pet store guppy tank. A tall bald guy with vaudevillainous eyebrows asks hoarsely, “Where’s Devilynn? I got my voice all sexy to meet her.” In the corner near the pool tables, a tall woman in a pink wig is doing a stripper dance with her back to MKM’s gangster mascot, grinding against him and using his suspenders to considerable effect.

Kelly is one of the first skaters to arrive, and immediately asks about Shorty. “Is she alright?”

I tell her what I heard over the PA late in the game, that she’s concussed but stable.

“I do feel bad, but it’s a tough game. I’ll call her in the morning.”

As Sylvia enters with a bit of a limp, an icepack on her shoulder, two drunk college kids start grappling nearby. One of them takes a swing and the other lunges at him, accidentally elbowing Devilynn in the back of the head. Before she can react, one of the regulars grabs the instigator by the collar and hurls him toward the door. The drunk kid turns around to protest, but Devilynn takes a few steps toward him and shakes her head sternly. All she says is “No.” It’s enough.

In the beer garden, a number of the NCDGs are chain-smoking and doing a post-op on the bout. At a table littered with Framboise Lambic bottles, two young women are arm-wrestling, their tattoo sleeves undulating with effort of their muscles.

The response from the GG girls to the close loss ranges from minimal to devastating. Says Champ Pain: “I wanted to win so bad. I cried. I cried hard. I had to go home and get stoned before I came here.”

As the witching hour approaches, what was initially very high quality pool becomes slightly less high quality pool. Drink in one hand, icepack in the other, Sylvia hugs Champ Pain and says, “Thanks for showing us what you’re made of.” With the pink-wigged girl at its epicenter, the corner of the bar has turned into a dance party. Then “Billie Jean” comes on over the jukebox, and the crowd doubles in size to a hooting swarm. The bar is so packed it’s almost unnavigable, but Sylvia’s boyfriend makes his way through from the dartboard to check in with her. He looks like a cross between a young Jay Leno and anOrangeCountysurfer – tall, big jutting chin, glassy eyes, art school ponytail. Seeing him, Sylvia bobs her head from side to side in time with Jackson’s syncopated lyrics and does a little soft-shoe. She wants to dance. Like most everyone else in the place she’s a little drunk, plus exhausted and injured and all she wants to do is dance to “Billie Jean” with her boyfriend. He’s not so sure. Not breaking eye contact with him she does the twist, as best as anyone can holding an icepack to one shoulder. He says he wants to keep playing darts. Resolved, she beckons him with a forefinger. Sighing, he steps closer, pulls a cigarette from a pack and places it between her parted lips. She smiles up at him with a half-lidded beer-happy sleepiness that’s just indescribably sexy. Together, they make their way out to the beer garden.

Despite her concussion, word has spread that the after-party’s still at Shorty’s, and at closing time, I hitch a ride with Kelly and Devilynn in Kelly’s car, scooting the championship trophy out of the way to make room for myself in the backseat. Kelly has to work in the morning, and she’s obviously very tired. She says: “The only reason I’m going to Shorty’s is because I gave her a concussion.”

At Shorty’s a couple dozen twentysomethings are sitting on the hoods of cars in the driveway and on beat-up low-slung couches in the garage, talking slowly and occasionally getting up to pour themselves Dixie Cups of Bud Light from a keg. Between two of the sofas is a large red bong. Shorty’s already there, sitting with her camo-clad boyfriend. Kelly approaches. Shorty stands to greet her.

“How’re you doing?” Kelly asks.

“Not so good,” says Shorty. “The doctor said I have a mild concussion, but, but that hit, that hit was the best I’ve gotten all season.” Devilynn squeezes Shorty’s shoulder, looking more concerned than either of the other two. “Shorty, I’m so glad you’re doing okay. I was so worried.”

Shorty: “I’m still a little concussed, but I’m awake. It’s just like a migraine, but with more dizziness and more nausea. I started bawling because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to roll.” A chorus of sympathetic “Ohhs” from the nearby girls. Through a pair of large speakers, Jim Morrison is telling someone to love him two times.

Chazzie stumbles into the yard, having spent the last hour at a club, and sets herself down in the half-light of the front porch. She looks like she was having a good time, and after barking at everyone who walks by, she stands and begins reeling about, drink in hand, trying to pick a fight with someone from the Mafia. Absentmindedly, she spills some beer onto Devilynn, whose own Dixie Cup has already made several trips to the keg, and Devilynn pitches up, taunting her for being drunk.

“This is bullshit,” says Chazzie. “And I love it. C’mere.” Chazzie tackles her and they roll around on the grass. A guy standing by a car in the driveway says to hold on a sec and he’ll turn his headlights on them, but before he can, one of the girls rolls her eyes and says, “There are not going to be any chick fights tonight.”